RESTORING FEMININITY AFTER BREAST AND HAIR LOST
After everything was worked out, I reluctantly faced a mastectomy. While still in hospital recovering from the surgery, I spoke to the oncologist about the best treatment that would give me the best prognosis. He discussed the treatment with me and told m
BREAST CANCER, for many, feels like a death sentence, and for women, even when they survive, the loss of their breasts and then their hair feels like the core of their femininity has been ripped from them. This was the experience of Dr Jennifer Mamby Alexander, which led her to create the Hair Loss Clinic of Jamaica. When Mamby Alexander discovered the lump in her breast, it was first diagnosed as fibrocystic breast disease. By the time she received the diagnosis of breast cancer, it was evident that she would have to go through the entire process of a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. “After everything was worked out, I reluctantly faced a mastectomy. While still in hospital recovering from the surgery, I spoke to the oncologist about the best treatment that would give me the best prognosis. He discussed the treatment with me and told me of women with a delayed diagnosis who did well with survival periods of up to 10 years,” Mamby Alexander noted. The 10-year survival was not long enough for her to nurture and raise all her children. She begged for maximum doses of chemotherapy. With the impending side effects of nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, feeling sick, and hair loss due to this intense treatment, she knew that the possibility of hair loss would be the hardest for her to come to terms with. She researched a few ways to prevent hair loss.
“The first was to place an ice pack on my head during the treatment in order to shrink the blood vessels in my scalp, thus reducing the medication that was getting to my scalp. The second was to place a tight rubber band around my head during the treatment, so that the blasts of the drugs would again be prevented from getting into the blood supply to my scalp. I felt that I had better control over the rubber band method than the ice pack method, so since I was grasping at straws, I collected all the rubber bands I could find,” she said.
However, Mamby Alexander still lost her hair. It was a heartbreaking experience. There was limited to no hair loss after the first two treatments, but devastation struck after treatment number three. It was as if her hair was no longer attached to her head, and as she ran her fingers through her hair, it came off as if it had not been hers to begin with. She remembers looking in the mirror and – combined with the loss of the breast and other body changes – feeling that she had lost her femininity. She reached her lowest state of depression in her life, even wondering to herself if this was what being a eunuch felt like. After losing all her body hair – eyebrows and lashes included – Mamby Alexander reflected on whether it was worth living at all. But she knew that she had to fight for her children, and she did.
She beat it.