hair issues

I keep worrying about a discussion I had with my radiologist a couple of weeks back about my hair.

Or rather, the lack of it.

"Well, that's not so bad!" she said cheerfully, after inspecting my bald head. I noted her optimistic tone for future mulling purposes. "You can just pull the stuff on top over it to cover it up!"

She was speaking in reference to the fact that my hair is finally starting to grow in again. But it's not growing in like I expected. Rather than growing in evenly, like I somewhat naively assumed it would, it's growing in patches and spots and at different lengths and directions. Large areas of my scalp are still bald. Other patches are covered just with a bit of downy fuzz.

It never occurred to me that my hair would do this. I just assumed that if it grew back, it would grow back like any hair after it's cut off--evenly, at the rate of one half inch per month. Or perhaps like the stubble on your legs when you need to shave.

That is not happening to me. Right now I have stubbly patches, smooth-as-a-baby's bottom patches, and industriously hard-working real-hair patches that I have to keep trimming because they're growing so out of proportion with the rest. Mostly it all looks terrible, but I do kind of like the stripe that neatly encircles the circumference at the base. It's pretty silly-looking on its own, but when I'm wearing a head-scarf some of it pokes out the bottom, offering the illusion that there's additional hair underneath the scarf.

There isn't, of course, but it's nice to pretend. No one needs to know that the hair patch that can actually be seen is actually only about an inch wide all around.

I can deal with that. What I'm not so pleased with is my doctor's suggestion of using the mohawk buzz-stripe across the top of my head to cover up the rest. I believe she was delicately suggesting was that I may very well end up with a permanent comb-over.

I don't think I can imagine anything less dignified.

So, I continue to develop my hobby in collecting pretty head scarves. And in the interest of remaining optimistic, I continue to chug down my flax seed oil every day. I choose to believe that my scalp will settle on a harmonious hair-growth pattern and that eventually everything will look fine, because flax-seed oil, downed in enough volume, fixes absolutely everything.

It's as good as religion.