Who Loves Ya, Baby?

So Karen's hair has started to fall out.

You call it "body hair," I call it "Sex Velcro."

Not a lot and mostly just in patches, primarily where the radiation was targeted, but it's definitely making a break for it, jumping off her skull and drifting over our pillows. Does it help that when she suspects a clump is about to go that she preemptively scissors it off? Probably not. Seriously, it's debatable how much of the hair loss is due to cancer treatment as opposed to being self-inflicted. But while Karen is certainly hyper-aware of the hair loss, you'd have to be actively looking for it in order to notice. Her hair looks pretty much the same until you start digging around her head like a chimp digging for fleas and stumble upon the empty patches. Still, she bought a couple of classic knit cancer hats from Target just in case it all goes. I guess the Rhoda-style headscarves won't be happening here.

The hair loss can be attributed not only to the radiation (which was concluded after five scalp-tingling treatments back on January 2) but to her second round of chemo this past Monday (the 13th). Like the last chemo treatment, this one left Karen pretty depleted and she's spent the majority of the week since in bed, sound asleep. As of today, she's starting to get more energy back and is up and moving around more (although that moving around is regularly broken up by extended naps.

So, yeah, the road ahead...

Karen will have a third round of chemo on February 3rd. This will be her first with Avastin so it's going to take longer and the addition of a new drug could also mean more or longer side effects. Sometime late in February, Karen will have an MRI to see if the radiation did the trick. There will also be another PET scan roughly around that time to see if the chemo is effective. It's pretty much just a waiting game at this point. And as a gaming professional I can confidently tell you that this is a pretty shitty game. Worse even than Daikatana.