This Wednesday is chemo-day...

If I'm honest, this has not been so bad. I probably mentioned in my last post that Momma hadn't been feeling too hot about the whole thing- insofar as she'd spent four days wanting and not-wanting to puke up her guts. I guess that's the thing about taking highly poisonous medicines; your body really doesn't want them in there.

Her piss was red for the first day, something she attributed to the dye in the drugs (which apparently were the most noxious vibrant red colour- just in case the whole experience wasn't awful enough already) and she was very tired. Don't get me wrong, we are a family of nappers. We loves a good ol' bit of shut eye. But I'm talking forty minutes of forty winks every other hour, and then a 8:30pm bedtime which is unheard of, because we like to sit up and watch trash T.V like Phil Spencer: Secret Agent and Gordon Ramsay's Hotel Hell. 

After four days of that she seemed largely okay again, certainly more perky. She told me just this week (well, she told my Great Grandma and I overheard) that she'd just felt like someone had sucked all the energy out of her and I can completely understand that because looking at it from the other side that's how she seemed. But we've been okay since then.

We've lunched out, we've brunched, we've spent 6 hours shopping. It's been pretty standard as our lives go actually, except she keeps making these awkward jokes about going bald & "Well, things can't be much worse." Of course, they could be; it just doesn't really seem that way sometimes. Some people really do get all the luck.

The bald jokes were kind of amusing up till Wednesday just gone; when, in spite of the cold cap she wore for four hours cooling her poor noodle to a chilly -30c, her hair started to come out. It hasn't come out in chunks, oh no. It's a slower, more tender death than that. Whenever she touches her hair a smattering of about 20 hairs come away. She's not tugging them out, and despite all my pleadings she goes on running her fingers through her thinning locks, teasing out the hair that had already formed before her follicles bit the dust, where the end of this last burst of growth reaches the other side of the scalp.

Tonight she says, all nonchalant, "After Callum's parents evening tomorrow, I want you to shave my hair off." 
I'm mortified, my mum has hair, she's always had hair. She'll always have hair, won't she?

The answer of course is no. If she's not moidered it into submission by Friday, the dose of chemo she gets in 2 days time will undoubtedly finish it off by the start of December. My poor beautiful mama, bald as an egg. I can't begin to fathom it, I mean obviously it's happening. The little piles of brown hair around the house tell me it's happening, but that doesn't mean it's any more real.

We keep joking about hats, but I don't want her to have to wear a hat. I want her to have her lovely, thick hair.

I think if I started crying properly, I wouldn't stop till I was desiccated and embalmed in my own tears; how ludicrous. It's not even my hair. I don't think I even want my hair any more, if I could cut & paste it onto her I would in a heartbeat. I've been researching having it made into a wig, and it'd cost all my savings but to help her it'd be so worth it. Who gives a shit about 2k, you can earn that back no problem. She can't earn her hair back, and it can't even try to grow back for another 5 months.

The lump in my oesophagus is back, it feels like I've swallowed my own fist. It's not something even the super-strength anti-indigestion tablets she's been prescribed can fix (yay more side effects of making her better, giving her rampant acid reflux and heartburn!)

But you know what, it could be worse and it isn't. And I've no right to be sitting around weeping when she's championing being poisoned for the sake of her wellbeing. So I've got to keep schtum, and be brave, no weeping children welcome here.

Poor mama.