Chemo Made My Hair Fall Out. Being Told It Would Grow Back Didn’t Help Me.

At age 29, I lost most of my hair while in treatment for aggressive breast cancer. Over five years later, and now in remission, I'm reflecting on the experience of loss and regrowth.

Welcome to Am I Cured Yet? I’m so happy you’re here. My sincere thanks for hanging out in my little corner of the internet.

Today, I’m writing about my experience of losing my hair while in treatment for breast cancer. This essay is part of a series on ‘regrowth.’

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Pre-chemo haircut. Photo by Breton Vivian.

“When will my hair start falling out?” I asked my oncologist during my chemotherapy teaching appointment. I was twenty-nine years old, newly diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, and on top of being terrified about being sick, I was dreading losing my hair.

I’ve always liked my hair. When I was a little kid, it was almost white blonde, but with time and the help of a few highlights, it’s now a respectable dishwater blonde. It’s wavy but not unruly and luscious without being too thick. I can straighten or crimp it, and it’ll stay put—rain or severe humidity withstanding—and except for one severely misguided haircut as a teenager, I’ve always kept it long.

My doctor told me hair usually falls out about ten days after the first round of chemo. His estimation was impressively dead on. Despite the fact I’d cold-capped, my hair started coming loose at an alarming rate, collecting in every corner of my West Hollywood flat like disease-addled tumbleweeds.

“It’s only hair. It will grow back,” friends and family members told me.

As if this thought had never occurred to me. As if regrowing my beloved long locks wouldn’t take several years. As if the only thing I was losing was a hairstyle and not a little piece of who I was.

Of course, my loved ones meant well. They saw I was hurting, yet, having no reasonable recourse to help, turned to tired platitudes instead.

I wanted to believe what they were saying was true—that it was only hair—so I tried to convince myself I could cope with the loss. But watching strands come loose broke my heart a little more each time: slight, sharp pangs compounding until I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror.

My hair had been my safety blanket. I’d blow it out big like Elle McPhearson when I felt unattractive. When I felt frumpy, I’d experiment with brighter highlights. And though I knew losing it would suck, I hadn’t anticipated how much it would feel like losing myself. Watching it fall out was about as big of an ego death as I could’ve imagined experiencing at twenty-nine.

I chastised myself for being so upset about hair. I wanted to be brave and inspirational, like those badass women who decide to dye their hair every colour of the rainbow before it falls out. Or the ones who throw a party where the main event is shaving themselves bald.

But I was unequipped to rally in the face of my pain. I was going to lose so many things before the age of thirty: my hair, my breasts, my period. How would I be a woman at the end of it? How would I even be me anymore?

I clung to the remaining hairs on my head, rocking bald spots and a pitiful mini bun. It wasn’t a good look, but it took me months to come to terms with the fact my hair as I knew it was gone, at least for the time being.

Finally, the day before one of my many reconstruction surgeries, I made a last-minute appointment at a nearby salon to get the mismatched lengths cut into a pixie that aligned with the regrowth.

Saved by the headband. Photo by Breton Vivian.

The consensus among my friends and family was that my new do looked cute, yet I hated looking in the mirror. I didn’t look like me.

There’s a long-running joke among people with cancer that their hairstylist is now their oncologist. It’s the type of humour that disguises a painful truth: every time you notice your baldness or your short hair, you’re seeing your sickness, your loss of choice, your life being nothing like how you’d planned. Looking in a mirror means being confronted with what cancer’s stolen from you: yourself.

Like an old friend, my long hair is integral to so many memories. I remember my Mum brushing it for school, pinning my plaits beneath my Peter Pan hat on World Book Day. I remember the countless times it was raked back into a bun for a ballet exam, hairspray liberally applied like lacquer. I remember curling it into perfect ringlets as a teenager with my childhood best friend, Emily, who has since passed from her own breast cancer diagnosis. I remember how it looked on the day I married the love of my life, my loose waves falling perfectly beneath a flower crown.

Yes, it’s just hair, and it did indeed grow back.

But it was far from the only thing which had to regrow after cancer. I had to regain trust in my body, confidence in my appearance, and love of myself.

Hardest of all, I had to regrow my sense of identity, one which incorporated my experience as a young adult breast cancer survivor and all the things that were taken from me forever.

These days, I have competition for ‘best hair.’ Photo by Breton Vivian.

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I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, thanks for reading! Take care of yourself :)

Emma

xx

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