On hair, identity and cancer

Today, I shaved my head. I did it because I'm starting treatment 1b tomorrow (1/4 of the way through) and that's looking like - from anecdotal evidence I've canvassed from all the lovely people I've been speaking to - the watershed for when hair falls out. So thought best to pre-empt it and get it shaved. Here's what it looks like  ---->
(apologies, model scouts, I'm awful at selfies) 

I'm not afraid to admit that I felt like crying during the haircut, was holding it in on the way home and burst into tears in the lift up to my flat.

It's silly, really - yes, it's only hair. But it's amazing to think that I didn't want to cry after I was diagnosed, after I was staged, after chemo number one... nope, of all those perhaps more pertinent times to cry, nothing.I was close when I got my letter, but didn't. Instead, it's the hair that's made me actually go and do it. I don't mean to sound like I was holding it in, attempting to conform to some sort of stoic idea of masculinity that belongs to a bygone age. I wasn't holding it in. I'm a modern male with emotions and feelings that I can, and do, articulate. It just happened spontaneously. It was just looking at myself in the mirror of the lift, as I do every day, and seeing a different picture, a different image of the self, that really brought it all home and made something inside me soften - even more so than seeing my name and "Hodgkin's Lymphoma" juxtaposed on a piece of paper.

I guess shaving my hair represents a departure from a sense of "normal".  There's obviously no shame in going through chemo and getting cured, and there's no suggestion I've been made to feel radically different in any way so far. Sure, I've been making jokes about looking like a Shaolin monk, like a Triad gangster, but the reality is it's a tough one for me to come to terms with: I'm soon going to * *look* like I'm going through chemotherapy. I'm going to look like a cancer patient in real life, not just on a hospital spreadsheet somewhere.

Of course, this just something I'll have to adapt to (and I will). Of course, one day I will be an ex-cancer sufferer. Much like going through treatment, I have no choice about either of those things. 

I am having chemotherapy number two tomorrow (chemotherapy 1b - 2 of 8, or 1/4 of the way through). Here's the picture of my neck today, 12th February 2015, alongside the older one from 29th January - before I started to be treated:

(Okay, I do look a little more gangstah now)
(I definitely share my sister's love of check shirts)

But anyway, as I hope is visible in the before/after pics, it's definitely gone down, which means, I hope, that it's responding to chemo treatment. I hope the mediastinal chest nodes are in the same boat and responding too.

It's the same treatment tomorrow (ABVD), after which I'll feel nauseous and tired for a few days, before returning to normal - all in all I spent this week-after-treatment forgetting I had lymphoma, living as close to a normal life as possible and enjoying myself.

I will now get treated again, have a week recovering (it'll take longer to recover from each treatment as time goes on, but I'm prepared for that) and then spend another week forgetting again. And that's the way it'll be from here on out, I think - until I'm better again.
And my hair grows back - albeit in a perhaps weird and wonderful new way (apparently it can happen).

In any case I will adapt to whatever happens and get through it.

"Strong" is not a characteristic I'd have ever really applied to myself before all of this.
Now it is.

T