Shedding

I am starting to lose my hair. When I woke up this morning, there were strands of hair on my pillow, and when I washed my hair, small handfuls came out. The top of my head is also a bit sensitive to the touch.
Pound by pound, I won't be able to compete with our dog, Sara, who leaves large volumes of her black hair all over the house; unlike her, I'm losing my "primary coat," not my undercoat, and mine won't be growing back anytime soon.
In the next couple of days, more of it will start to come out in clumps until it gets annoying, and I will ask Richard to get out the buzz-cutters and shave it all off. Two of my sisters-in-law kindly bought me hats when they were visiting, and Suzanne showed me how to tie a scarf around my head so that my crown is uncovered when I go in the gompa. I'll be more stylish than ever! Sorry, Gamo - no wig for me.

With this chemo regimen, I'm also slated to lose my eyebrows, but not my lashes. I bet some of you have some suggestions about replacement eyebrows - tattoos? or little "wiglet" eyebrows I could paste on? (which insurance would doubtless call "eyebrow prostheses" : )

I've been through this before, when I had chemo for breast cancer 12 years ago, so it's not unsettling the way it was then. I'm obviously not one of those people who spends a lot of time on my appearance, but even so, the first time it happens, it's somewhat upsetting to have your hair falling out - and that's a separate issue from the sense of self-consciousness the first time you go out in public without any hair.
There's probably some overlap with the way newly ordained nuns feel about their heads, but it's also distinctly different: There's something about having your hair fall out that makes you feel like your body is failing you - despite the fact that your hair is only vaguely your body in the first place. It's certainly not "meaty" the way the torso is, nor essential the way the heart is, but it still feels like part of "me" (whoever that is).
This whole experience of cancer provides lots of opportunities to contemplate the body, and many different ways to search for the body, in a conventional way. Is the IV port implanted under my skin part of my body? When they took out a bunch of organs, did my body get smaller? Well, I lost a bit of weight, but the outline of my body is still the same, so it seems not. I've even thought of it in terms of "body math": minus 1 omentum,* minus 9" of colon, plus 2 ports, minus hair, minus eyebrows. No matter how I add it up, I still have 1 body.
Do you think that soldiers who have lost all their arms and legs feel like they have half a body? or two-thirds of a body? How did Marsha Mason, the woman who spent most of her life in an iron lung, think about her body? Did she feel like the iron lung was part of her body? an extension of her body?
For me one of the best arguments for the emptiness of the body - for "body" as mere imputation - is phantom limbs: Even when you lose, say, an arm, your mind keeps telling you there is an arm there, and not just that but that it hurts too. But we also have these parts that are sort-of our body, like hair and nails. And we have that personal space around us, that feels like an extension of us; when someone enters that space, we sense it, and it's a bit like being touched. Our body awareness exends beyond our skin. How does that work?
Even the fact that the size of that space is influenced by our culture emphasizes how empty it is (for example, that the English usually have a larger zone than the Spanish).
Thankfully we all know about the ultimate nature of our body. Now for working to attain a realization of its emptiness . . .

*About the omentum: I'd never heard of it either until my "omentectomy." My surgeon told me it was like the appendix, in that I probably wouldn't miss it when it was gone.
Richard enjoyed making jokes about it: "Of course you're tired - you lost your omentum" : )
This website describes it as a "fatty apron" and describes another use for it: "The omentum is a handy tool for surgeons, who use it as a kind of biological duct tape. Sections of omentum are grafted onto cut areas or lesions to help them heal. It's been used on the gastrointestinal tract, heart, spinal cord and brain."
The Wikipedia entry has some diagrams and a bit more info.