Fun with hats!

For the first time in my life, I'm having an absolute blast wearing hats. They can look so positively glamorous!
But it wasn't always so. I'd always rather liked hats but my hair, which when I had it was impossibly curly, tended to make hats bounce right off. Plus, if there's one thing which I loathe with a passion, it's hat hair. Here's why.
In England, where I grew up, school children all wear uniforms, which is great because you can roll out of bed and put on your uniform, and off you go to school. No need to spend hours on the phone with your best friend figuring out what to wear the next day, or trying on outfits late into the night, which is how my three daughters spent most of their high school evenings.
Back in those days, an essential part of the school uniform was The Hat. We had a winter hat, which was a sort of navy blue felt thing with a hatband in our school colors, and we had a summer hat, which was a straw boater that looked like this and was unbelievably heavy.
My school had all sorts of impossible rules and regulations, including the color of your underwear and the thickness of your stockings, which we all bent whenever we could, but the rule governing the wearing of The Hat was the one we feared most.There was no such thing as a school bus in those days -- when the bell rang, we left school and walked: some took the city buses, others, like me, walked over a mile to the train station. I don't think anyone's mother drove to school to pick up her daughter. The minute you left the school grounds, you'd better have that hat on your head or you were dead meat.
We girls weren't the only ones walking -- the teachers were also heading home as well as the prefects, girls who were seniors and whose job it was to police the younger girls. So the roads were positively crawling with spies, and being spotted, and reported, for the serious breach of No Hat in Public, led to instant detention at school the next day.
One of the other hard-and-fast rules was absolutely no eating in public. "Very unlady-like," according to our headmistress. But we were starving teenagers and the London streets are thick with sweet shops, so we used to duck in for a packet of potato chips and a 1/4 lb of chocolate malteasers, stuff them into our blazer pocket and hope no-one had spotted us.
A group of us was in the sweet shop next to the train station one day, stocking up on munchies for the train ride, and I'd taken off my boater, sitting it on top of my book bag while I decided what to have. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash. Horrors!! A bottle of lemonade was stuck head first through the middle of my boater. We all froze. How the heck was I ever going to explain this?
Luckily my dad had the sort of glue you need to repair a boater with a hole through its top and I think I ended up concocting some complicated story that involved one or both of my brothers, so on that occasion I escaped punishment!Sorry, this has rambled on from the hat hair issue, but the point is that for all those school years I was positively tortured by those blasted hats, especially the boater which left me with a most extraordinary hair-do -- flat on the top and square on the sides. Really, really unflattering.
But now, my friends, I have turned into a total hat maven. I'm enjoying it while I can -- and that may not be for very long -- because I've suddenly got a layer of baby fluff growing back on my head! WooHoo!!

So what exactly is chemo?

In the life I lived before I became a cancer patient, I never gave any thought to what chemotherapy actually was. I'm the sort of person who's fascinated by all sorts of weird and wonderful things -- but finding out about chemotherapy just wasn't on my To-Do List. I thought it was a bunch of pills.
Well, let me enlighten you. Chemotherapy is nothing as simple as a bunch of pills -- it's a life-style and takes up huge chunks of time and leads to all sorts of worrying and fussing. I'll walk you through some of the highlights of my chemo experiences to date.
Once I'd finished with all the scanning and testing that the charming Dr. Z had signed me up for, I was given the green light for chemo. I was to report on Monday morning, every two weeks. On arrival you get a number on a blue card and go to the blood draw room for a finger stick. (Linda Madaffari and Edward Montoya are two of the fantastic phlebotomists at Norwalk Hospital) Your blood is sent off to check for white and red counts, which show whether you're in good enough shape to take the chemo. Then you're weighed, vitals taken and the good Dr. Z comes to poke and prod you, ask endless questions, all to make sure you're not sick in any way at all. If everything is A-OK, then you go and bag a chair in the infusion room, wait a while so that the nurses can custom mix your drugs according to Dr. Z's recipe, and finally you get hooked up. Getting the drugs doesn't hurt at all, which is one positive thing. The whole process from arrival to departure takes about four hours. You spend the rest of the day feeling a bit foggy.
The day after your infusion, you have to get a shot in the arm, so back you go to the hospital, get a number on a yellow card from the ladies at the desk and wait until the nurses spot you. The shot is something called Neulasta and it gives your white blood cells a boost -- and makes you feel achey as if you have the flu. Wonderful.
The reason for all the pre-chemo testing is that if there's any infection at all, you get a big F on your report card and are sent home with a prescription for antibiotics. Standing orders are that if your temperature is over 100.5° you must head straight to the ER. The chemo drugs are so toxic that they destroy both the bad cancer cells as well as other perfectly good cells that are just minding their own business. It's heavy artillery that knocks out everything within range. Nothing subtle about it. I hope that one of these days they'll develop fine-tuned drugs that can zoom in on their target more accurately, but for now this is what we have.
So the day I blew my nose and saw a version of Benjamin Moore's Grasshopper (a lovely shade that looks fantastic in my mudroom and really picks up the color of the slate on the floor) on my Kleenex, I knew I was in for it. I sent Dr. Z a text. "I think I've got a cold". Two minutes later he's on the phone. "What's going on? You need to come in. I'll see you in half an hour." The man is relentless. Back to the hospital. Another finger stick. More waiting. Another chance to get weighed, poked and prodded. Another half a day lost. I went home feeling ghastly, and spent three anxious days sleeping, taking my temperature and antibiotics, knocking back Tylenol like it was going out of fashion and drinking honey and lemon.
After eight weeks, I was done with the first set of chemo drugs and I'd survived. Phew!

Eyelash Batting Plans Laid to Rest

It's a good thing I didn't bother to invest in an assortment of fake eyelashes because I bumped into my friend, Gina, this morning and she gave me some astonishing news that put an instant kibosh on any plans I'd had for batting sexy new lashes at Dr Z. next time I saw him.
Our conversation went something like this:
F: Guess what! My eyelashes have all fallen out and I'm going to get some fakies!!
G: But without eyelashes, they've got nothing to stick to.
F: Don't they stick to your eyelids?
G: No, they rest on your eyelashes.
Gina is an absolute wizard with make-up, while I consider myself a third-class citizen at best in that department. After all, my entire arsenal consists of a Lancome mascara, a freebie eyeshadow I got when I bought the mascara, an eyeliner my daughter threw out, a bronzer my girls gave me for Christmas 3 years ago and the new eyebrow pencil, so my repertoire is very straightforward. Wait, I forgot. I own a couple of lipsticks, though one just melted when I left it in the car.
I decided to give Gina my full attention. I should also mention that she teaches a class for people with cancer called Look Good, Feel Better, so if she doesn't know what she's talking about, no-one does! First she gave me a great tip for making lines on my eyelids with a dark grey eyeshadow which will look as if you've got eyelashes. Hmmm! my one eyeshadow is half beige and half brown. I'll give it a shot with the brown one. Next I should draw some little "c" shapes with the brow pencil, very lightly, and that will look like eyebrows. I think I can handle that. I promised Gina I'd give it a try.
I decided it might make sense to sign up for the make-up class at the Smilow Breast Cancer Center and see if I could pick up some other tips. Who knows, when I have my new lashes, brows and hair (please not the facial hair!!!) in a few months, maybe I'll have turned into a make-up wiz too.