Music, morale and hair

As I go stomping through puddles on my way to and from my daily radiotherapy sessions, I often listen to music. I've made my own playlist (in my day they were called compilation tapes! Ha!) of feel-good tunes that get me stomping along in rhythm and sometimes make me do a little wiggle/supermodel walk. I've realised that the music has two main functions: on the way there, it makes me feel good and ready. On the way back, it banishes any feelings of self-pity that occasionally lurk in the darkest shadows of my mind. My keeping-up-morale playlist is as follows:



Smooth Criminal - Michael Jackson [Annie are you OK!]
Work (Freemasons Radio Edit) - Kelly Rowland [THE tune for a crisis of any kind]
Brain Stew - Greenday [Ha ha ha]
Monkey Wrench - Foo Fighters [Just because I love it]
Buddy Holly - Weezer [Ditto]
I think we're alone now - Tiffany [This may be what makes Stephen disown me]
I think we're alone now - Snuff [Punk version of above. Does this redeem me?]
Angel Interceptor - Ash [Ash had to be there!]
Take the power back - Rage Against the Machine [Ditto]
Baila Cinderella - Hubert Laws [This is the one that makes me do the supermodel walk]
Over and Over - Hot Chip [Makes me feel a bit cool]
Wake up - Arcade Fire [Makes me feel a bit epic]
Monosyllabic girl - NOFX [Makes me smile]

This playlist may reveal me as being hopelessly stuck in the 90's, but it certainly does the trick. It came in particularly handy yesterday. I was sitting waiting to pick up a prescription in the hospital pharmacy after my treatment, and was absentmindedly fiddling with my hair, when I found a really big knot. I started to gently untangle it with my fingers, then the whole lot came out in my hand. Now this sounds quite dramatic and awful, but it wasn't unexpected - my hair had started coming out a bit on one side earlier in the week. The first time a noticeable amount came out was when I washed it, and that was a bit of a shock. Then for the next couple of days, I noticed the hairline around my right ear starting to look patchy, as well as significantly more malting than usual (fellow long-haired people, or those that live with them and do the hoovering, will corroborate that malting is par for the course). Anyway, so I sat in Pharmacy with a handful of my hair and felt quite sorry for myself. I picked up my prescription, dropped the hair in the bin, and, still feeling a bit sorry for myself, headed off. But by the time the opening thrashes of Greenday came on, I was doing the supermodel walk again.

My overall hair is actually fine: on the right hand side, where the radiotherapy x-rays go in, I've got what looks like a (very trendy) undercut, but I've got plenty of hair to cover it (see photo, taken last night). I'm probably going to train my parting to be on the other (left) hand side, but other than that, no action required. It's actually quite cool because, if I lift my hair up, I can now see my brain surgery scar, which is very neat but therefore probably not conducive to a story about a shark attack. Never mind.

So after a slight hair-related dip in morale earlier this week, lots of music and lots of love and big cuddles from Stephen have picked me up again. I'm not expecting to go completely bald (been there done that when I was 18. Sorry Mum.). I'm expecting to lose the hair at the sites where the beams go in, but hoping that I've got enough in other places to do elaborate comb-overs and other such glamourous do's. And if anything more dramatic does happen to either hair or morale, at least I'll know that I've got Kelly, Greenday, Tiffany et al to see me through.