Hey there everyone! Long time no blog. I know right? It has really been a month of visciousness but now I am ready to get back at it with humor, wit, vim and vinegar. Here we go.

As I embark on my soon to be fifth month of hairlessness after shaving my head on video on the 24th of March, I am realizing just how much has changed. I can remember thinking OMG how am I going to survive doing this? How much more vulnerable can I get? Now EVERYONE will know that I am sick without being told! ( as if my public announcements and all the videos had not clued everyone in already. Ridiculous right?) I am not sure I can handle this! I’m not sure I can pull it off! The list of original thoughts goes on and on, all with the same underlying theme of potential fear and lack of self-confidence.

Well, that said, it really hasn’t been that bad. Actually, there has been a strange element of ultimate freedom that arrived simultaneously as my hair departed. I can remember rubbing my head in the mirror, both surprised and soothed at the smoothness of it. I can remember my daughter exclaiming in surprise, ” Hey mom! It really doesn’t look as terrible as I thought it would! Your head actually isn’t gross to look at!” Gee thanks honey. Best compliment I ever got…lol Apparently she had visions of some wrinkled, misshapen, irregular mole-filled lunar landscape. Glad I was able to surprise her.

Seriously though, I meant what I said about the freedom. It’s as if being bald offered an explanation about my health that I didn’t always need to confirm verbally. No, it didn’t lay out the specifics for me, but it, pardon my pun, gave a “heads up” to people even before we entered a conversation together. It somehow took the pressure off by allowing them that extra few seconds to reconnect their mouths and their brains before they said something that they regretted. I may be stretching this a bit, but I dare say that sometimes I think it has made people a little nicer to me. Now whether or not that was genuine or just forced awkward sympathy, I will take it gladly. Somedays you just need a little extra kindness, no matter what the source.

Here’s another bald bonus. The shower time has literally been cut in a third! I am lightening fast at getting ready in the morning. I can literally shout out ” I’ll be ready in 5 minutes” and actually mean it! I am also able to claim the occasional sensation of being cold for the first time since menopause started teasing me five years ago. Ok that is pretty fantastic right there. I was pretty sure the word cold had disappeared from my vocabulary all together.

Don’t let me kid you or myself though. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses. All positives I mentioned aside, being bald has it’s share of negatives as well. It metaphorically facilitates a visual and mental level of vulnerability like nothing you have ever experienced before. It is a daily visual reminder that you are, in fact, not yourself right now. You have something going on. You are sick. All the scarves, wigs, and sparkles in the world cannot erase that visual completely. Sometimes that is tough.

You sunburn more easily on your head and dang it, I never realized how much my hair shielded my eyeballs from sunscreen. Wow does that burn! I realized quickly that I had to decide between altering my application technique and wearing some kind of tacky headband to keep that from happening. By the way, the altered technique won. I was not going to walk around with a large sun stripe on my forehead.

All in all, being bald has not been as rough as I would have thought. Sometimes I think I am getting too used to it. I actually start worrying about how I am going to temperature regulate when my hair starts growing again. For a moment, I actually considered keeping it going. Then, just in time, Facebook will pop up a memory of a particularly fabulous picture of me from the past with a great hair do and I am jolted back to reality. Yeah, life with hair was good too.

Have a great day everybody!

Dr. Katz