What I did with my hair....

Back again the same day! Goodness I'm keen....well actually I'm just waiting for my lovely lazy Italian friend Gaita to get here so we can go swimming. I also have a jar of Green & Blacks chocolate hazelnut spread in my room, and a bar of Hotel Chocolat chocolate (73% cocoa). About 10 minutes ago I had the bright idea of dipping a bit of chocolate into the hazelnut spread .... well, enough said. I have now eaten about half the jar and will probably sink in the pool like a dead whale (do they sink or float?) SO am trying to distract myself from the chocolate by writing away...

The first question I asked the haematologist on Friday 13th was "Is my hair going to fall out?" She grimaced and said "Yes."
To which I replied, "BOLLOCKS!"
I am quite vain about my hair - it looks like this (I don't normally pout this ridiculously, I promise - I blame the wine at the Halfway Ball.)



One of the booklets I read obsessively last weekend was called "Coping with hair loss" by Cancer Backup. Its advice was to get my hair cut short as soon as possible, as long hair falls out faster with chemo (gravity). I got very excited by this, so I took myself off to the hairdresser's on Tuesday with lots of pictures and told them to bleach it and chop it all off.

Here's a quick photo I managed to snap:



And this is me after! Good lord eh?? I look like a happy dandelion.


In fact this is all very liberating. Before this I would never have even contemplated chopping off this much hair, or going this blonde - but have always secretly wanted to!It's been amazing distraction therapy - obviously I won't know what it's like in chemo e.g. how fast it'll fall out/thin/whatever, BUT I tell you that Marilyn Monroe compliments make a girl feel better about having cancer...

I got my CT scan results on Wednesday, and I'm Stage 2A. Not the best news (we all want to be 1A don't we...) Basically it means I have 6 nodes altogether - the right supraclavicular one we all knew about (the one with the fetching biopsy scar), and then a little one on the left above the clavicle, and some more camping elsewhere in my neck, and a little one above my thymus. God knows where/what the thymus is - I'm a medical student and I have no idea. How embarrassing. It's somewhere at the top of my chest or in the mediastinum. I wasn't really listening because I was sneaking a peek at the CT report and guess what else they found??? Completely unrelated to any lymphoma shizzle?

I have a bicornuate uterus: as darling old Wikipedia (first refuge for all medical students) tells us:


"A bicornuate uterus, commonly referred to as a "heart-shaped" uterus, is a type of an uterine malformation where two "horns" form at the upper part of the uterus.

Pregnancies in a bicornuate uterus are usually considered high-risk and require extra monitoring because of association with poor reproduction potential. A bicornuate uterus is associated with increased adverse reproductive outcomes like:

1. Recurrent pregnancy loss. The reproductive potential of a bicornuate uterus is usually measured by live birth rate (also called fetal survival rate). This rate is estimated around 63% for a bicornuate uterus. ^[3]

2. Preterm delivery. With a 15 -25% rate of preterm delivery. The reason that a pregnancy may not reach full-term in a bicornuate uterus often happens when the baby begins to grow in either of the protrusions at the top. A short cervical length seems to be a good predictor of preterm delivery in women with a bicurnuate uterus. ^[4]

3. Malpresentation (breech birth or transverse presentation). A breech presentation occurs in 40-50% pregnancies with a partial bicornuate uterus and not at all (0%) in complete bicornuate uterus. ^[5]"

Spiffing. Absolutely spiffing. SO if chemo doesn't fry my eggs I will have a miscarriage or a low birthweight baby...oh well we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, as my dad said...

Next time: chemo/more on the Hodge/whatever twaddle comes into my head. xx