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| Jan 29, 2009-Part 3:Does color really matter? |
Is perception reality?
Does hair color selection really matter to whom you are as a person? While in ninth grade, I remember asking a good friend what color her hair would be if she hadn't started bleaching it blond. Her playful response was, “mousy like yours!” Less mousy and more gray recently, unless I was acting a part onstage for which a wig was called, I never thought about coloring my hair. But now, with no hair of my own to color, this is a question I might be able to answer for those that are curious. So I promised to answer from my limited perspective the decades old question: do blonds have more fun?
Before I started chemo, I bought a brunette wig to handle my few public appearances. Such an occasion arose on my birthday early January, when my family had made donations to a charity event that featured comedian Richard Lewis. I tried my wig on the day before our event and my husband thought, that similar to my normal hair, it looked like a possum had crawled on my head and gone to sleep. I was told that hairstylist Charles Ennis of Horst & Co. donates his time to help cancer patients with such issues, so I went to seek his advice. While there, I couldn’t help but notice a brownish-blond number. Why not? I can pretend to be anyone I want now.
Charles placed the wig on my head and both my husband and he said for the first time since entering the salon, I really smiled. That was enough for my husband to buy it for my birthday, and me to wear it out the next night. Many people came to say hello to us in my first public outing in two months, several did not realize it was me, and a few, I think, shunned my husband out with “this blond” when his wife was ill!
Thanks to the magic of the Konter –Weiland family’s gift to our community (the show) and the sensitivity of JEA Director Adam, I was ushered back stage before the show to meet Richard Lewis as my special birthday surprise. I had a great few minutes and even got a birthday kiss! How fun! I thought, “cancer is so liberating...” Whoaaaa.... what? What a stupid thing to think. But there that thought was, and I had not been on drugs in four days! Maybe it is not about the color of my wig, but how one feels about the color.
Am I really less inhibited as a blond or do I just feel a sense of freedom play-acting someone else for awhile? Does play-acting someone else make it easier for me to feel like I am not really a cancer patient? So maybe the real question for the cancer patient again is one of perception and reality. By extension does being treated like a patient make you feel like a patient ? More importantly, when I treat myself like Sick Chemo Carol, am I more vulnerable and less able to tap into the power of the medicines trained professionals use to heal the parts of myself that I still control?
Last night, MorningStar and Savannah Jewish Federation hosted it’s first Cancer Answer Health Talk* to a crowd of about 75 people. I was so happy that I could turn my disease into an event that could help other people. During the question and answer period, someone asked a question that did not seem to have a medical answer: could finding out you have the BRCA gene for cancer make you eventually develop cancer? In other words, is there any evidence to suggest that having the perception that you will get cancer makes that come true? I was elated: I am not the only person who thinks like this!
I could finally finish this blog, I thought, because my ideas about perception were not so crazy. If something as simple as wearing a blond wig could make me less inhibited, surely willing myself well (or conversely worrying myself into sickness) was not so far fetched. But the more I thought about it, my premise was wrong: does knowing you have disease make a difference in the way you live your life and should it? No. Life should not be about fooling myself into believing I am healthy and nothing is wrong, but living each moment the best way I can. Easy to say—hard to do.
Exasperated about some nonsense last summer I said aloud, “I need to retire.” My daughter responded “you can't.” Thinking she was acknowledging that I was indispensable to my causes, I felt quite self important, until she followed with, “You can't retire because you don't have a job.” True it has been a long time since I accepted money for expertise in any field to which I have a university degree, but all these years I busied myself with jobs I thought were important. Maybe that is the illusion.
In retrospect maybe the world would be okay without one more project and with one more quiet blessing at a sunrise... even from a blond.
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Posted by morningstar on 2009-01-29 07:10:47 | Rating: | Views: 84
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