It took some soul-searching to publish this photograph, but here I am chemo-bald, dressed as a hairless red devil to celebrate Halloween 2014. It was the one and only time I went out in public without a wig. Many people are familiar with that famous photograph of Joan Lunden when she was battling breast cancer, bare-scalped on the cover of the October 2014 edition of People magazine. The TV host looks stunning with or without hair. She also wore attractive make-up that masterfully recreated her missing lashes and eyebrows. I had neither Joan’s model-standard good looks nor well-applied makeup, just red eyeliner that came with the devil costume. Ugly CJ versus stunning Joan. For that reason, I kept this photo under wraps for the past eight years. But I thought I should finally let it be seen during October, breast cancer awareness month. I wanted to not only show solidarity with all the breast cancer sisters who are dealing with chemo and hair loss right now, but also celebrate the release of my new warts-and-all comic memoir and survival guide, My Wild Ride: How to Thrive After Breast Cancer and Infidelity.
Another bald beauty was Adrienne Wilson, who died of metastatic liver cancer at just fifteen years of age. Her face graces the cover of Better off Bald: A Life in 147 Days, a memoir by her sister Andrea Wilson Woods. After I was a guest on Andrea’s Cancer U Thrivers Podcast, she generously sent me a copy and her evocative writing sucked me in right from the first page.
In 2014 I was diagnosed with breast cancer—for the second time, this time on the right side, while my previous case in 2007 had been on the left. I had a lumpectomy to remove the tumor and everything seemed fine. Clear margins. It looked like I would just be dealing with a short course of radiation as I had for my earlier diagnosis. Everything changed when I got the pathology result back from the sentinel node biopsy that was done as part of the surgery. It showed a micromat—a small cancer growth—in one of the lymph nodes, which meant that I had to do chemotherapy. I was seriously bummed. I managed to persuade my oncologist to replace the Adriamycin she had originally wanted to give me—known as the Red Devil—red in color and potentially damaging to the heart, with Carboplatin. A platinum-based drug, Carboplatin appeared to have good results for the triple negative type of tumor that I had. Shame I didn’t get jewelry to match. It was somewhat ironic that the Halloween costume I wore that same year was of a red devil. Clearly, the costume was less damaging to my health than the drug of the same name, but being bald was considerably damaging to my psyche and self-esteem. Even though hair loss is a painless and temporary symptom of chemo, it has a major impact on breast cancer patients. I devote three chapters of my new humorous self-help memoir, My Wild Ride: How to Thrive After Breast Cancer and Infidelity, to related issues—one chapter covers chemo, another hair loss and a third looks at wigs.
I underwent six sessions of infusions with a cocktail of Carboplatin and Taxol. My fourth chemo session was on October 21, 2014, just 10 days away from Halloween. I mused about different costumes that would work with a bald head. Perhaps some kind of space alien such as a Borg from Star Trek? Halloween had been exceedingly different for me the previous year. I had been in Hawaii, doing an underwater pumpkin-carving competition in Scuba gear—unfortunately my pumpkin cat won no prizes. It did not help that the teeth I had cut in its mouth fell out. One of the winners had carved a VW bus complete with the VW logo—very impressive.
Halloween 2014 saw me far away from Hawaii’s beautiful ocean, confined to dry land in California. Instead of wearing Scuba gear, I dressed up as a hairless devil, complete with glittery red accoutrements—horns, bow tie, black fake fingernails and a pointed tail. I was unused to wearing long plastic fingernails and found them a complete pain. Anything needing fine motor skills became extremely difficult to achieve, whether tying shoelaces or using a computer keyboard. I had seen so many women wearing them, not for Halloween costumes but in shops and offices. It made me wonder how those people managed to get any work done that required them to use their hands.
One out of every eight women in the US and the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime, and cancer in general is the second leading cause of death in America. So almost everyone will be touched by cancer—even if they escape the disease, they will have friends and relatives diagnosed with it.
Venturing out trick or treating as a chemo-bald adult, I was given a lot of candy and plenty of sympathy. People felt sorry for me. Some invited me inside their homes to tell me about their own cancer stories. The worst thing was that going outside with a naked scalp on a cold October night in the San Francisco Bay Area felt bloody freezing. No wonder bald men like to wear hats. It is not just vanity!
Photo © 2022 CJ Grace