My baby started losing his hair today. Hannah cried. I’ve sort of . . . almost, here and there. And why? I have been previously annoyed by people saying, “oh, will he lose his hair??” as if that even rates anywhere of remote importance on the scale of what is lost. Doesn’t rate with the risks of life-threatening infections, permanent hearing loss, heart damage. Doesn’t rate with endless needles, with worried brothers and sister, with not letting the dog play with him for fear of licking, with not letting him go to his Bible class, which he loves. Doesn’t rate with middle-of –the-night ER runs for 101 fevers. Doesn’t rate anywhere with an inoperable tumor that’s growing, again.
But my baby started losing his hair today, his beautiful soft blonde baby hair (Hannah cries, “but it’s so soft, and I like it, and it makes me sad for him to be bald”) and I feel a bit weepy. Perhaps, because now for the first time he’ll look like a kid with cancer. As a baby, his hair loss didn’t give him away, and he was just such an energetic, happy baby his overall appearance, if you didn’t see the tube hanging out of his chest, was of a perfectly healthy, though perhaps a bit pale, child. But now, he will look more like the other precious children at the pediatric cancer clinic. His hair falls out, and he is looking a bit peaked, with little purple circles peeping up under his eyes. The little warrior of mine, the bullet-dodger, can’t quite evade all the results of what he has to fight. So mom is a bit weepy, and after all, Hannah is right . . . it is so soft, and so beautiful.
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