My Pillow Looks Like a Mogwai

Earlier today I was watching Louis C.K.'s most recent stand-up special on Comedy Central, called Chewed Up. In it, he talks brutally honestly about the physical vicissitudes of aging. He does a bit about Cinnabon that rivals the already hilarious one of Jim Gaffigan (Chesterton native!). He weaves this into his routine, which focuses at length on the uncontrollable changes that happen unexpectedly to the male body as it grows older. Women appear on the edges of the bit, but mostly it centers on men, and the unavoidable hard realities of aging. Mostly he talks about weight gain and the overall nonchalance with which he sees his advancing decrepit, and simultaneously swollen, body.

One thing he doesn't mention, though, is balding. This bothered me somewhat because I couldn't stop staring at his disappearing hairline. His hairline now resembles either a cartoon supergenius or the bumpy one of a Klingon. Or, if you want to be more poetic and less pop-oriented, it looks like a newly exposed, empty seashore after the tide recedes. I may have been overly sensitive to this once I noticed, last night/this morning, that the typical loss of hair that goes along with chemotherapy had finally begun to affect me.

I had been warned that this would probably happen, so I wasn't surprised by it. In fact, I asked my nurse about a week ago why I had not yet lost my hair. She, too, expressed curious wonder that this had not happened by then. I had heard, and seen in various popular culture references, that my hair would likely fall out. I even shaved my head both to lower the shock of others and not to look like a cult member out of Lord of Illusions. Upon my first hospitalization, a man walked by my room before I entered it myself and I remember being mildly disgusted that he had not opted to shave his head. Random strands of hair fell across his head, hardly covering the bare scalp underneath his nauseatingly pathetic "hair."

As I've mentioned before, I decided to mitigate the element of surprise that goes along with this side effect of chemotherapy by shaving my head. Herein lies the problem: I had not done enough, because a mere buzzcut does not go all the way. A minute but palpable layer of hair still grew perceptibly on my head, so I ignored the stark fact that it too would be gone.

Last night, I washed my face and acknowledged the abnormally high number of small hairs that had fallen onto the handtowel I used. I shrugged these off dismissively, as well as the small wreath of brown hair that had appeared on the cushion that I used on the sofa while I watched television, supine of course. Then I got up in the middle of the night to meander over to the bathroom by my bedroom. Before I flicked off the light I had turned on before I peed, I saw what looked like a small animal on my pillow.

I couldn't tell if I needed to go into a defensive stance or not, because it was unclear whether or not this was an innocuous being. One thing was clear, though: this was a Mogwai, straight out of Gremlins. Whether it was the fairly innocuous brand of Gizmo or the toxic, ugly, fricassee-ish batch that rips up the town in that movie was unclear. I approached cautiously, but was a little disappointed, and a little disgusted, to find that the mass of hair on my pillow was my own.

All the warnings and astonished proclamations of "You haven't lost it yet?" from my nurse had convinced me to forget about this little side effect/inevitability of the chemotherapy. But there it was, and here it is, so be prepared for my bald--totally--pate if we cross paths.

By the way, too, they don't tell you about the prickly soreness that you feel with the baldness. Doctors and nurses warn you about the hair loss, but they neglect the tender scalp that comes with this.

It may not be uniform, and some may not feel it as acutely as others, but it'll be there if you should be so lucky as to have your immune system pummeled by chemotherapy. Trust me. Throughout a prolonged medical procedure, medical personnel seem to shrug off the possibility of such inevitabilities, but I think they should prepare you for the worst and act bewildered when you don't sprout wings, for instance.

Oh, awesome--my fingers are still attached to my hands! I would gladly broadcast that histrionic response to obvious absurdities rather than hold onto hopeless hope for unrealistic expectations. I'm a pragmatist at bottom, and many people misconstrue this realism as pessimism.

Hope is fine, and even preferable to despair, especially for those with terminal diseases (or those of us who refuse to vote Republican), but MS is not terminal, no matter what uninformed dolts think. Call me crazy, though, but I prefer the practical to the improbable.

R
--PS Urlacher's out for the season for the Bears. Great. More later--I need to sustain a sigh for the next few hours.
--PPS My beloved Dalton, the best cooler in the business, aka Patrick Swayze, is no more. Sad.