No one warned me that losing my hair to chemo would hurt physically.
I braced for the psychological toll, but I hadn’t anticipated the unbearable pain of strands that were shedding so rapidly, they twisted and tangled into dense matted clumps that felt like steel wool against my skin.
They needed to be gone, like, yesterday.
I ‘d been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023 at 35-years-old and lost my job that same week. My world had completely spun out of control, and I was facing impossible choices: Do I leave my Brooklyn apartment to undergo treatment in Los Angeles with my parents? Mastectomy? Lumpectomy? Do I freeze my eggs ahead of a treatment that could compromise fertility? Should I undergo chemotherapy?
While doctors had caught my cancer at an early stage, my strong family history made a straightforward path forward elusive. In the end, I decided to relocate to the West Coast to be nearer to family. I spent those early days sobbing into my mother’s sleeve, crying so hard that I could barely choose what to order off a menu, let alone make life-altering decisions about my body. I touched my hair, knowing that choosing chemo would mean accepting a visual marker that I (me, the person who never got sick) was a cancer patient. It took many “un-brave” meltdowns to get there, but once I had made the decision to start treatment, a wave of deep, unexpected calm settled over me. I was no longer in the driver’s seat, and there were no more decisions to be made. In the infusion room, I had no choice but to surrender control over my body—and my hair.
The only thing I could control was how I moved through the experience. So, I made one last decision—to change my mindset. I decided to turn losing my hair into a party, honoring how far I’d come and celebrating the community that had helped get me there. After all, I hadn’t done any of this cancer thing alone, and so it felt only right that I should do this part with my family and friends, too.
Celebration of life—and bravery
I had delayed the party until my matted strands became so painful, I couldn’t wait one more second to lift them off like the weird hair-hat they’d become. I knew it would be easier to say goodbye to hair I wanted gone, hair that was actively hurting me.
So, thirteen days after my first infusion, I placed a chair in the center of my parents’ living room, which was the perfect setting for such a momentous occasion. Sunlight cascaded through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the exposed wooden beams and pitched ceiling made it feel like we were in a ski lodge instead of the San Fernando Valley. This was the room where I’d broken my leg at seven, where I’d practiced lines for a school play at thirteen, where I’d opened my college acceptance letter. And now, this would be the room where I would lose all my hair.
The head-shaving party idea had been born out of desperation for agency amidst the chaos of cancer—and it turns out I was onto something. “Rituals are a way to insert our own meaning into our experience,” Charlotte Christopher, a therapist specializing in cancer and oncology, told me. Christopher is a cancer survivor herself and describes such rituals as “a kind of social technology that creates blueprints or maps to guide us through experiences.” When it came to losing my hair, creating my own roadmap became more important to me the more I felt I was losing control of everything else.
In the kitchen, my mom was preparing a pitcher of sangria as guests slowly shuffled in and found their seats in the half-moon formation of chairs I’d set up around me. Wigs sat atop styrofoam busts in the living room with signs directing guests to try them on. The playlist I had curated hummed beats by the Bee Gees, Four Tops, and Paul Simon, communicating a vibe that this was meant to be fun.
Of course, that didn’t mean ignoring negative feelings about my situation, but rather harnessing them. “Perhaps paradoxically, staying connected to anger can be an important part of maintaining a sense of agency as a cancer patient,” says Christopher. “Not corrosive anger, but the kind that bubbles up energy inside of us and rejects the idea that we’re failing at whatever we imagine is the ‘right’ way to go through an experience.” While I knew there was no ‘right’ way to lose my hair, I knew what I didn’t want: to be crying in a bathroom alone with my mom, trying to figure out clippers.
A chorus of love and solidarity
When it was time to begin the hair-cutting ritual, I paused the playlist and nodded to my friend Ryan, who stood behind me with an acoustic guitar. He had flown in from Colorado just for this, and I’d asked him to play The First Cut is the Deepest during the ceremony since it was silly and I wanted smiles. I took my seat and everyone quieted. On a computer in front of me, 13 out-of-towners also tuned in on Zoom to be part of the experience.
I would have given you all of my heart
But there’s someone who’s torn it apart
One by one, I invited friends and family to come up and cut a piece of my hair. My sister, who also had breast cancer, went first. My then-partner, Kyle, surprised me and flew in from New York just for the day. He cut a piece, and he held my hand while I smiled through tears. My mom, my dad, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin, childhood friends I had known since first grade, and friends I had met in New York, all cut a piece. Mandy was there. She was one of the many breast cancer survivors I had met through my journey. She had finished chemo three years prior, and any time I had cried about losing my hair, my mom had reminded me to think of Mandy, whose hair was fully back and gorgeous.
Barbara Jacoby is an award winning blogger that has contributed her writings to multiple online publications that have touched readers worldwide.