Broken Doll

By 2pm today I was exhausted — not ordinary I’d-like-to-take-a-five-minute-brain-break exhausted, but to the point where I couldn’t put complete sentences together. Couldn’t follow a train of thought. My hands shook. I wasn’t sure I could stand up without falling. And here I am trying to carry almost half of a small company on my shoulders, no one else who can do it, and I can’t. I can’t keep up. It’s too damn much.

I can’t even walk the three blocks to work without breathing hard.

And Sunday night I spent an hour on the phone with my mom crying because I was afraid to wash my hair. Afraid of how much of it would wash down the drain. Another fistful gone and how thin would it look? And it turned out that despite the golf-ball sized mass of (now-short, no less) hair, it’s still hard to tell. So of course I’ll be doing this again tonight. My hair is dirty and needs a wash and how much of it will go down the drain? How visible will it be?

I’m too tired. Too tired to deal with this. I get home and can barely move, can’t pack for moving house, I feel like I’m way behind on everything. There’s no one here but me. And I can’t keep up. And tomorrow I may wake up feeling okay like this morning but then go to work and do it all over again until I can’t even move by early afternoon.

My nose bled all over the bathroom sink tonight. I blew my nose because I couldn’t breathe with all the blood clots in there and it just came loose and bled like a river. And here I’m thinking that if I tell my nurses about this, I don’t have the time to give them if they want to see me.

I need to wash my hair. I don’t have the energy to deal with the wig. I want to cry.

Technically it started Thursday morning. You know how you always comb out loose strands of hair in the morning… there were more of them. A wad of hair about three times as big. But I combed and it stopped coming out and I spent four days pretending to myself that it wasn’t real, that it was a fluke, that it would stop.

So this morning I comb and the wad is that big with every stroke. A handful of hair for each swipe of the comb. And I comb and it doesn’t stop. I comb some more and it’s still not stopping. In the shower strands tangle around my hands and come away in clumps. And I comb my hair again and it’s still not stopping.

So I finally just quit combing.

I somehow got it into my head that this would be a relatively neat process. They told me it would fall out pretty much all at once so I imagined locks of hair falling out in patches… strands I could collect, braid together, hang on to.

But it’s a mess. Tangles, clumps, wads. Hair everywhere. I’m afraid to even touch my hair at all for fear it will just shed out completely, a tangled wispy mess trailing from room to room on the floor.

You can’t tell yet. I’ve stopped combing so it stays. My hair’s a mess, it needs a combing, but I don’t want to touch it. I tried to straighten out some clumps to braid together and couldn’t. I don’t want all of it to end up in some tangled messy pile on the floor.

Tomorrow I will call the wig place and have them cut it off. At least that way I can braid and save some of it. I think I will leave it maybe an inch long. I don’t think I can handle going from long hair to nothing in one leap.

I haven’t had hair that short since I was maybe 5 years old. Even in elementary school my hair was at least chin length. I’ve been growing it out for 15 years, hoping that it would get longer than just past the shoulders and realizing after a while that it just won’t grow any longer than it is.

I can’t even imagine what this is going to look like.