What Breast Cancer Really Feels Like: Tales of Brain Fog, Body Changes, and Pain

Hair…going, going, gone
The same drugs that target cancer cells can do a number on your hair follicles, says Eric P. Winer, MD, a medical oncologist and chief of the division of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and chief scientific adviser at Susan G. Komen for the Cure. “Depending on the kind of chemo, we know exactly when hair will fall out.”

Kim Regenhard lost her hair on a business trip. “It was a week and a half after my first treatment,” says Regenhard, who’d had a lumpectomy, then chemo and radiation. “The first day I facilitated the meeting with short hair. The next morning my pillow looked like a squirrel. Then it came out in clumps in the shower. The day after that I went to the meeting with a wig on. Thankfully, I had a lot of support from the people in that room.”

Alice Crisci, 32, revels in being bald. “My thing is to get ahead of the change,” says Crisci, who is still undergoing chemo after being diagnosed with stage I breast cancer in February. “It’s so liberating,” she says. “A shower or the wind feels great on my bare head. More important, for me, wearing a wig meant I was hiding the hellacious thing I was going through. I don’t want to hide.”

Eyelashes, eyebrows, and other body hair also may thin during chemotherapy but tend to take longer to fall out. “At one point I was down to three eyelashes,” says Eloise Caggiano, 37, a three-year survivor who had a single mastectomy before beginning four months of chemo. “I was trying to be so gentle when I washed my face, and I kept willing those lashes to hang on.”

Crisci says she’s down to “like five pubic hairs. I tell people that I am having the most painless Brazilian waxes.” Hair typically begins to grow back within a month or two of chemo being completed, Dr. Winer says. When it returns, it’s often grayer or curlier before returning to its original look.