GUEST POST BY MICHELLE YOUNG FROM 4WOMEN.COM

Susan Beausang, Founder 4Women.com & the BeauBeau

It’s on the calendar – date, time and place, an appointment you never imagined yourself having to keep, an appointment you never wanted, an appointment you wouldn’t dare miss.  It will be your first chemo treatment.  It is still a couple weeks away, which means you have plenty of time to imagine what it will be.  If you are at all like me, you might find yourself imagining every shade of worst-case scenario.  While we may not have much choice about keeping that appointment on the calendar, we do have choices when it comes to the thoughts we choose and the actions we take.  Ideally, our goal is to not just cope with the reality of cancer, but to turn our anticipation, reluctance, and fear into a determination to imagine and create our own best-case scenarios.

Cancer throws us into the “present tense of crisis”¹ in the same way that a hurricane or tornado does.  Just as anticipation of a hurricane stirs us to take actions to protect ourselves from the worst forces of the storm, so can anticipation of cancer treatment and its potential side effects propel us into actions intended to empower us to not just cope, but to thrive.  A positive self-image coupled with a strong sense of self-love help fuel our motivation to seek out that which feeds and nourishes our bodies and our souls.  A cancer diagnosis can catapult our relationship with our bodies and with ourselves into the wind as we suddenly feel like an entirely different person from the person we were pre-diagnosis.  We want desperately to hold onto our self-identity and our sense of “normal,” but the sometimes drastic changes in our physical bodies and appearance that result from cancer treatment can leave us feeling robbed of ourselves and utterly disempowered.

We are not vain for caring.  Appearance changes can significantly impact our perceived quality of life during cancer treatment.  Some women find that though they feel generally well, one glance in the mirror sends a sharp reminder that they are “sick,” posing a major visual obstacle to self-identifying as “well.”  In the words of one respondent to a 4Women.com survey, “Hair loss branded me as a cancer patient and ‘different’ when I desperately wanted to hold on to the normal parts of my life.”

That is why it is not just hair.  Without hair, we feel stripped of our identity and in the context of cancer, it often feels like we are systematically being stripped of ourselves.  We have every right to want to feel good about ourselves because at no time is such love of self more important than when fighting cancer.

Woman wearing the BeauBeau

By taking proactive steps to determine our appearance without hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, we can boost our self-confidence and reduce that sense of “present tense crisis.”  By regaining even a small sense of control over those factors we can control (such as outward appearance), our burden lightens and we gain both strength and motivation to take other day-to-day actions aimed at improving our overall quality of life during and after cancer treatment.

For specific tips for turning your hair loss anxiety into self-empowerment and creating your own best-case scenarios, visit 4Women.com’s blog.  The tips appearing there were all provided by women who anonymously responded to 4Women.com’s survey exploring anticipatory coping strategies among women who lose or are likely to lose their hair during chemotherapy treatment.  Their tips remind us that we are not alone on this path.

¹Chemobabe blog 6/24/11 post titled “Shifting Time”

4women.com is a wonderful resource for those going through hair loss due to chemotherapy side effects and other conditions. They have a community blog with tips and stories of others experiencing Alopecia, and they sell the popular BeauBeau, a fun, stylish, comfortable head scarf that comes in more than 350 different fabrics (featured in the photos above). Click here to visit their site!