Hair and Hearing (Monday-Wednesday, August 13-15, 2012)

It’s a bit of a slow news week. I did, in fact, have hassle free flights on the way home on Sunday evening. The flight to Denver was on time and my Denver-Manchester ended up getting in 10 minutes early- a far cry from the ordeal coming out. Nell departed Santa Fe the next day and her flight to Chicago and on to Cleveland also went off without a hitch. And Con and Kate made the Albuquerque-Chicago-Manchester flights seamlessly on Tuesday, arriving at 5PM. Their only problems arose afterward. They stopped at Market Basket and while Con shopped, Kate was in the car with the A/C on and car turned off. So when Con came out, the car wouldn’t start. After they finally solved this problem, Kate suddenly remembered that she left her wallet on the plane. So it was back to Manchester to retrieve it in Lost and Found. Needless to say, child # 3 was not in the good graces of her mother for the balance of the night. Meanwhile I had some above average Nypro related activity keeping me busy these several days. Other than having a business dinner on Tuesday night at Moo (excellent Boston restaurant), I don’t have much to report on the culinary front.

But I did want to mention the topics in the heading. It is finally happening. Right from the start, I was advised my hair would start coming out. But week after week, nothing much was happening. In a small way, this helped leave a veneer of normalcy around the chemo process. I even held off getting a haircut in anticipation of the hair falling out but finally had to break down and get my locks chopped as they were getting too long. Alas, in the last few days, that has begun to change.  The amounts of hair coming out has accelerated. Now there is the physically taxing side of the chemo ordeal. And by and large, I have fortuitously avoided the hardest aspects there, generally feeling good with minimal pain. But I can now better appreciate the emotional, visceral side of the equation, of which losing your hair may top the list. It does affect you. And when it happens right when my weight keeps going up from the eating frenzy I’m on, it’s a double whammy. Since I started with very thick hair, I still have some amount of hair left but it is clearly thinning quickly. And both Kate and Con were razzing me last night, saying they hadn’t signed up to have a fat, bald guy as their dad and husband. Oh well, at least I can start a diet even if I can’t do much on the hair front.

As to the hearing side, my doctor friend Mike Cunningham had suggested I get a baseline hearing test as one of Cisplatin’s side effects is sometimes hearing loss in patients. Though technically it wasn’t baseline since I’m more than halfway through chemo, I did go into Nashoba Medical Center for a hearing test. When the audiologist asked me to describe my hearing symptoms, I told him that my wife and daughters say I don’t hear them very well. I added a couple other impressions and then headed into the lab for the actual tests. As it turned out, unlike my hair situation, my hearing results were pretty normal other than a slight deviation at one higher pitch. I asked if it was possible that Con speaks at that pitch and that’s why I don’t hear so well. But he thought, as did Connie, that maybe a lack of attention is the true root cause. I’ll keep you posted on both the hair and hearing fronts.