Thursday, February 11, 2010

MDS Becomes AML - Singin' the Hairless Blues

I'm freezing.

It's usually pretty damned cold in this house, but this morning I can't get warm at all. A puzzlement.

Then, it dawns on me. The chemotherapy for the AML has left me bereft of much hair. And then Penny trimmed the cranium covering yesterday in an effort to make me look a bit less like a madman.

And most of my beard had dropped off; the remaining stubble has stopped growing.

I'm not bald. Well, not on top anyway. But, there's nothing on the sides, and but little on the top. I haven't been this shorn since I was 10 and crew cuts were all the rage.

No wonder I'm freezing.

I'm sitting around the house feeling like a constant breeze is assaulting me from the neck on up, when the common skiers' wisdom dawns on me: on cold days, wear a hat or a helmet because 80 percent of your body heat goes out your head.

Aha! Luckily, my cousin Susan, a real Vermonter, knitted me a hat whilst I was in hospital. It's perfect for this situation. I put it on and—volia!—I'm toasty warm.

So, here is sit, head covered indoors like some old orthodox Jew, waiting for the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, and on my tiny skull, to return to me.

Patience.

5 comments:

  1. Patience is a tough word o doubt but i love the positiveness here. and once you are positive nothing can stop you. keep up your spirits Mitch.

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  2. Just remember your peeps are out here pullin' for ya.

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  3. I'm curious about the bone marrow transplant, like you have to have a matching donor, but how do you, or the docs, go about finding such a person? Is there a donor registry of people who say (much as I was thinking last night) hell yeah, Mitch can have all of mine he wants?

    We're in Denver at Lynn's theater critics meeting, had dinner with Claudia last night and Claire & Ral (long for Al..) tonight.

    Sending you mile-high white energy beams. Steve

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  4. Steve--
    Yes, there's an international registry for donors - www.marrow.org. Finding a match is based on a simple inside-the-cheek DNA swab test.

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  5. Argh, www.marrow.org says donors may not be over 60, the reason being that the risk of side effects from anesthesia increase with age. I wouldn't think that would apply for the blood sampling process where they run the donor's blood out one arm, thru a machine that collects just the cells it wants, and pump the same blood back into the other arm. So I called to ask about it and all they said was that both procedures follow the same age guidelines. Jeez, if colonolcopy docs thought this way, they'd lose, so to speak, 2/3 of their patients.

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