Every Wednesday morning, or whenever, I go to the person I call the "cancer shrink." Basically, he's a social worker connected to the hospital. We sit in this really spare room and talk. It's just off the hall where you get your chemo. So you complain while people zonked out on Benadryl get toxic waste pumped into their veins.
I like the social worker because he is very hard to read. In fact, he rarely expresses much. I like this because I don't complain a lot outside of the cancer shrink room, or at least I think I don't, and this means that when I complain in the cancer shrink room, the person I'm in there with isn't making some big deal out of it and weird faces and what have you.
I was wearing the T-shirt you see above today. I sat down and waited in the waiting room before the appointment. There was another woman in there, older than me and wearing a red hat. I'm bald and mostly don't cover it up. I think this is because I originally thought I was trying to prove something to everyone else -- Fuck that shit -- but I think really I'm trying to prove something to myself.
Fuck hiding. Or whatever.
The lady said she wanted to not wear a hat, and she sort of tilted up her hat so I could see the mostly gone hair there, nothing but a few strands left or so. We got diagnosed around the same time, and we have the same number of treatments left. And she said I looked beautiful. Twice, I think. And then when the cancer shrink showed up, she told him that I looked beautiful, too. So, thanks, lady in hat, for that.
She said something when we were talking about mostly it's hard because of vanity. Yeah, I said, because you can't hide it anymore, not even to yourself, when you look in the mirror. She nodded. She knew what I was saying.