Exile on Mane Street

My hair started falling out a few weeks into chemo, and it really messed with my...head.

Illustrations by Abner Clouseau

The new season of The Bear started recently and we’re a few episodes in and it reminds me that the reason I started growing my hair out originally was because I wanted that dude’s hair, Carmy’s hair¹, his perfectly untamed sandy-blond locks, an approximation of which I thought I could maybe pull off. So I saved a few pics on my phone, showed them to the person who cut my hair, and was like, “I think I wanna do this,” and she was like, “That’ll take about eight months,” and I’m sure neither of us thought I’d stick with it.

Turns out I did, which meant that by the time my hair started falling out a few weeks ago as a result of the chemotherapy, it was the longest it had ever been. I’m not saying it was '90s-Metallica length, and it didn’t end up looking much like Carmy’s pretty-boy tangles, but it was long for me, long enough that it spilled out the back of my hats, long enough that I started blow-drying it, an activity heretofore foreign to me.  

My oncologist had told me there was a good chance I’d lose it—not everyone does, but it’s common. Chemotherapy is the process of administering cell-destroying chemicals into your body. It specifically targets rapidly growing cells, which in addition to cancer cells also includes hair follicles. Sure enough, two to three weeks after my first treatment, I started to notice how easily small tufts could be gently pulled out. Did that used to happen? The tufts got bigger. I noticed them wadded up in hats, dusted across my pillow.

“I recommend patients shave it before they have to call a plumber,” my oncologist told us.

And so my wife and I headed to the backyard with the clippers. We hit a temporary speed bump because Danielle could not resist the temptation to give me some kind of mullet a la Paul Mescal, which I figured was her right, given the number of gnarly, wedding-vow-straining ministrations she’d performed in recent weeks involving the full gamut of bodily fluids. She enjoyed her handiwork for a few days before I finally insisted we take it all the way down to a proper buzz cut. But the buzz cut was perhaps not the best choice, because it endured for maybe 24 hours before the hair loss found a new gear. Pretty soon, little bald spots started to appear, then there was more baldness than hair, but still some hair, and so within a day or two I looked like Harold minus the Purple Crayon, with this weird, thin layer of fuzz covering my head. On top of this, all my beard hair fell out save for the patchy gray parts, so my face resembled an old sailor’s². Combined with my having lost 35 pounds in just three weeks, it was an extremely off-putting look, conveying to anyone who encountered me that I was indeed quite sick. Or at least that’s how it felt when I looked in the mirror.  

But this, I realized, was not a totally unwelcome development, perhaps one with certain fringe benefits. For example, two days after my second chemo treatment, I went to a small music festival by our house. One of my favorite DJs, Jamie XX, was opening for LCD Soundsystem as part of a three-night bill that we’d bought tickets to several months ago, before any of the cancer stuff. In my condition, there was no way I was going to attend the entire event, but as I found myself recovering small amounts of strength in the preceding week, I started to entertain the possibility of maybe trying to show up just for this one set. Doing so would require some planning. I had enough stamina to walk maybe a few blocks by then, but my legs felt like twigs, so we’d need to rent a wheelchair and borrow a friend’s handicap parking pass and make use of the ADA services the festival provided. Given how shaky I felt, I was on the fence about whether to attend right up until a few hours before we needed to leave, but the prospect of doing something not just normal, but like, in my case, ambitiously normal trumped my reservations about whatever could go wrong. And so we packed up the wheelchair and drove to the grounds, made our way to the handicap parking, and wheeled my ass in.

The festival had very good ADA services (not that I have anything to compare them to), including a riser just off the stage. A friendly attendant greeted us and showed us to a spot with a great view. It was about 6:30 p.m., and the sun was starting to go down behind the nearby hills, on what had been one of the first bright days during a month of overcast skies. I looked around at my fellow festivalgoers from my perch atop the risers, happy folks swilling boozy seltzer, several dressed in their best woke up looking like this outfits. I was wearing real shoes for the first time in over a month.

When Jaime XX took the stage and started his set, I welled up. I’d spent most of the preceding six weeks in a state of bodily collapse—puking, anemic, doped up on painkillers, calling 911, etc. Ten days removed from my last hospital stay, here I was basking in magic-hour light, with bass rippling through me, surrounded by revelers. It would have been easy, perhaps even advisable, to stay home, but we didn’t—we made it happen, made this happen, and after the experience of the last six weeks, this happening felt like exactly what I needed, so much so that…I wanted to dance.

But could I dance? I believed I physically could—not dance, exactly, but get up from my wheelchair, navigate the four steps down from the risers, and at least stand amid my fellow festivalgoers gently rocking back and forth (let’s face it—the bar for dancing isn’t high at these things). But should I? I mean, I’d availed myself of the ADA services, had been escorted to this great spot among my disabled cohort. Would it be weird to just suddenly stand up from my wheelchair and step onto the festival grass? Would I be outing myself as a fraud?

But then I remembered: My hair! Or rather, my head—that sickly knob with its distressing thatches of baby fuzz. If it didn’t read “cancer” precisely, it certainly evoked a dire illness of some kind. A simple glimpse at my dome would assuage any concerns that I was somehow taking advantage of the situation. No one was asking, of course—I’m sure no one even cared—but in my mind if I wanted to get up from my wheelchair and dance, I’d have to take my hat off.

Did I do it? No, of course not. Too weird, and I was either too vain or too scared. But I thought about it, for longer than made any sense. For like 30 minutes—about half the set—I sat there contemplating the wisdom of getting up and dancing, then I finally just did it, or something vaguely approximating it. None of the attendants or other disabled folks said anything (duh), but I still felt occasional pangs of guilt, and the thought lingered: If only I’d shown them my head…

I ended up keeping the baby hair look for another 10 days. It wasn’t until some friends came over to cook me dinner and saw it for the first time that I found myself articulating to anyone why I’d grown attached to it: It was clear and definitive proof of my illness, a testament to my resilience but also an invitation to sympathize. This feels stupid to admit now, but lemme tell ya: A lot of stupid things run through your head during an experience like this.

One of the best Simpsons episodes is the one where Homer gets ahold of a secret hair-growth formula that produces instantaneous results, bestowing on him wavy, flowing locks. Overnight, his entire life is changed: His colleagues respect him, his boss notices him, Marge wants to fuck him. His life becomes joyful and carefree, all because he finally has hair. In keeping my sick-baby hair, I think I was looking for something like the exact opposite to happen: I wanted commiseration, pity, condolences, and maybe some perks. Eventually, I realized this was misguided, and I shaved it all off, returning myself to a state of Homer-dom: just another unremarkable middle-aged bald guy with nothing particularly interesting going on.

1. As a devoted home cook who’s probably put in his 10,000 hours (if you count watching the Food Network), I have strong opinions about some of the actual cooking on this show. For example, why if she’s even remotely qualified to be Carmy’s CDC, does Sydney keep making dishes that are so unpalatable they have to be spit out?

2. Additionally, both my pubic and armpit hair fell out. My eyebrows plus arm and leg hair stayed put. Weird.