Losing His Hair - September 03, 2009

Pete came home from work a little early today. He said he was just feeling a bit off and quite tired. While I was getting the dogs' dinners ready he came out into the kitchen and said, "Well, looks like I'm losing my hair."

Now, you've got to understand that my son began losing the hair on his head somewhere in his mid-to-late 20s and decided that he was absolutely NOT going to have a bad comb-over like his father, so... He's had a shaved head for years now. But he's had a very neat goatee for even longer.

When he started the chemo we had joked about not having to worry about going bald, but what he was holding up in his fingers when he made the comment were some hairs from his goatee. It would have been funny if he didn't say it the way he did. I think those hairs were a very tangible reminder of what is going on.

On the more positive side, I got an email from a teacher who retired from my school several years ago. Her son was diagnosed with cancer just a few years after I started teaching there, so I'm talking 20+ years ago. He was a freshman at Rutgers U at the time. She had written to tell me that she would be praying for my son and all of us.

I didn't know much about cancer back then, so I asked her what type of cancer it was. She responded it was osteosarcoma, and considered a "childhood" cancer that affects both soft tissue and bone, and though there are only several thousand cases of the soft-tissue sarcoma that Pete has, her son was only 1 of about 700 cases. He did lose his leg, but the good news is that he's still going strong. Pete's sarcoma doesn't affect the bone and is generally found in older people (by that I mean considerably older than my son who was 33 when diagnosed). Hearing that Martin faced this disease, but more importantly, a sarcoma, and survived makes me more optimistic. He also was treated at MSKCC in Manhattan.