Naked mole rats

I get spun out for the most bizarre set of reasons. Over the last week I have been coming to deal with what it will mean to have chemotherapy. Some of the issues I have with chemo are the Big Issues: what does it mean to put a bomb off in my body? What are the long term implications of this intervention? Some are even more terrifying: What does it mean to be thinking of myself as so at risk for metastasis that chemo is the right choice? Some are fear and sadness woven together: the discomfort, the loss of work, the loss of my ability to travel, the loss of our plans for Aidan’s Bar Mitzvah. But oh, how it pains me to admit, that the idea that I fixate on most is the loss of my curls.

I should have bigger concerns than this. And yet, with each form of hair I realize I will lose, I have a new surge of misery (see footnote one). My hair—which I only discovered was curly 3 short years ago—gone (see footnote two). This feels impossibly tragic. Then the horror of realizing I would lose my eyebrows. And my eyelashes. This feels disfiguring—it will change totally the way my face looks. I realized that my horror was about looking (and here’s the rub) like a cancer patient.

I knew that this had gone too far when last night I looked at my reflection and realized I would lose my nose hair. And then I began to find myself teary and feeling sorrowful about the loss of my nose hair. What would breathing feel like? What about when it was cold? Wouldn’t that sting to breathe cold air without any nose hair protection? Wouldn’t my nose feel and look different without hair?

Now here a note to those who love me. If you ever try to talk me out of my misery at a time like this, it will go badly. The more you tell me—no matter how lovingly—that I will live well without my nosehair or (worse) that it will grow back, the more I will defend the horrors of nosehair loss. I will dig a pit of despair about all the ways my nosehair has been a vital part of my identity. 

Now I might (and probably will) come to think my absurd concerns are absurd. And you are welcome to join me in looking back at concerns we now both believe are absurd. But if you try to get me to believe that my current concerns (no matter how absurd) are not concerning, you’ll back me into a bad place instead of helping me out. Counter intuitive, I know, so I’m not claiming logic (this is after all a post about nosehair) but I’m letting you know.

In the depths of my misery about all of this hair loss, I began to think about the naked mole rats Aidan used to love so much at the National Zoo in DC. These are horrible looking creatures for many reasons—they are blind and constantly bumping in to things, and they tunnel in the dark, backwards, they have freakish faces—but perhaps the most startling is that they are totally hairless.

I went to Wikipedia to find a vision of these dreadful creatures—these creatures that reminded me of my chemo-poisoned self. In intended to wallow in self-inflicted misery. But, in the many things I am surprised to learn on this breast cancer journey, as I read about them, I made a totally new discovery:

Naked mole rats appear to have a high resistance to tumours; cancer has never been observed in them.^[19] …On June 19, 2013, scientists reported that the reason naked mole rats do not get cancer may be because they produce an "extremely high-molecular-mass hyaluronan" (HMW-HA) (a natural sugary substance), which is over "five times larger" than that in cancer-prone humans and cancer-susceptible laboratory animals.^[29][30][31] The breakthrough scientific report was published a month later as the cover story of the journal NATURE.^[32] A few months later, the same University of Rochester research team announced that naked mole rats have ribosomes that produce extremely error-free proteins.^[33] Because of both of these achievements, the journal SCIENCE named the naked mole rat "Vertebrate of the Year" for 2013.^[34]

Suddenly, this “Vertebrate of the year” for 2013—which had been my poster mammal for the horrors of my cancer treatment—looks like the poster mammal for my long life.  I ended up giggling in bed over their pictures and hoping that I have multiple things in common with these creatures (but I would like to pick which things they were…). This then is what life feels like: real tragedy, manufactured (self-generated) tragedy, and laughter. I think if you listen really well, you can hear the naked mole rats giggling.

Silver lining footnotes: Chemo benefits: the untold story.

Footnote 1: The first person who introduce this idea of the loss of all body hair to me was the nurse you might remember reading about last week (the one who thought that if I “slapped a nipple on it and pumped up my left breast, I would have great boobs). She also told me she thought I could really carry off bald, and she leaned forward and talked in a somewhat hushed tone about the delights of “a free Brazilian.”

Footnote 2: The broad consensus is that after chemo, hair grows back curlier than it was before. This leads me to think of my Great Grandmother Clara, who as a child saw her sisters get some kind of illness (pneumonia I think) and lose their hair just to have it grow back curly. The story in my house is that Clara used to sit with wet hair next to open windows in the winter, wishing and wishing for the disease that would make her hair curly. I intend to be in daily contact with her spirit as I go through chemo because I believe she would willingly sacrifice hair for a year or so to get better curls for the future.