Woe is me!

I have been through a lot these past 13 months, and I haven’t let it get me down. I’ve surprised myself throughout this ordeal by being upbeat and pragmatic. But over the weekend I think I finally reached my limit. 

It’s hard enough having hair that is being exceedingly slow in its re-growth.  When I saw the nurse practitioner in July she told me that in her long career she had only ever seen two other patients with such slow re-emergence of hair and she referred me to a specialist. Lucky me! I saw the specialist in mid-September and she asked about the incidence of male and female-pattern baldness in my family, and then recommended twice-daily applications of Rogaine – and not just any Rogaine, but Rogaine for MEN! And I have to give it a six-month trial before we go to plan B, which involves a scalp biopsy to determine the root cause – pun intended. So, I may be wearing scarves for another six months, long past the last of my herceptin infusions on October 17th and the removal of my port soon thereafter.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back came Saturday afternoon, when I was snacking on a small handful of roasted nuts. I hit something hard, which I thought might be a piece of shell, only to discover that it was a bit of tooth. I checked for a broken tooth on the side I was chewing on and, finding no gap, became concerned that the object in question was someone else’s. Yuck! Eventually, it occurred to me to probe the other side and there it was, a seemingly large gap at the back of a tooth. Drat. One of the last things on this Earth I needed was to have a major dental procedure, but there is no way around it the dentist said. I now have to have a crown. Lucky me!

To add insult to injury, despite having stayed remarkably healthy while on chemo, I have succumbed to a stomach bug this week and actually missed work today and a good part of yesterday. I know that the counting of such things is arbitrary, but let’s hope bad things only come in threes and that given my hair (or the sparseness thereof), my tooth, and this bug I’ll be free of this bad luck for a while.  If not, then woe is me!