How to Cut Your Own Hair

A myeloma survivor wrote a step-by-step guide for patients cutting their own hair.

"How to Cut Your Own Hair" written just prior to my stem cell transplant to treat my multiple myeloma in 2015. (The poem has been revised a few times.) At the time, I couldn't decide whether to have my hair cut by a hair stylist or whether to cut it myself, all while secretly hoping I wouldn't go bald at all! While I am the subject talking to myself in this poem, I believe this poem might speak to many patients with cancer facing their first bout of baldness caused by chemotherapy. Treatment to prepare for the transplant was rugged, and I felt I must be defiant.

How to Cut Your Own Hair

First, give up vanity, your dependence on opinions of others about your style, how it might be shaped or tailored to reflect their vision, not yours. If you are a writer, consider your receptivity to editorial intervention, another’s vision superimposed upon your own, and weigh the worth of giving up your own authority.

Second, invest in very sharp scissors, a pair of long blades, and short ones, too, long metal clips to hold back what you’re not yet ready to cut, a mirror that distorts self-reflection, ignores reality. Although you want to see what you are doing, do not stab your eyes while chipping into those blunt cut ends hiding your face.

Third, swallow your pride if you want to succeed. Your effort is no better nor worse than anyone else’s; this isn’t what you’d do if you had other options, more money or time, more fearlessness about present and future unknowns, consequences. When it’s done, probably less perfect than imagined, remember everything will regrow, be it hair that sprouts on your bald head, or rogue cells sabotaging a second chance.

Fourth, take photos before and after, selfies of a self in media res caught between transformation by your own hands — an act of defiance directed toward those other hands piercing chest walls, hip bones, arms, veins, and, if you’re not careful, your belief in yourself. More than anyone else, you must trust yourself, your will to pull through the eye of a scary needle that offers some kind of hope when no cure exists.

Fifth, be mindful. Contemplate the absurdity and seriousness of your condition, prepare to ignore abstracts and cling to your body, for it has substance you can grasp when you cut your own hair, offers an illusion of control when staring down what you cannot control. Chemicals will destroy your immune system, a wildfire blasting everything to nothing so it can grow back whole, a controlled burn for which your hair will be insignificant kindling.

Finally, if/when you cut your own hair, keep your eyes open—most of what is about to occur is out of your control, shorn hair an irrelevant necessity to reclaiming who you are/are not. You will look like someone you’ve never seen: yourself.

This poem was written and submitted by Linda Puffer. The article reflects the views Puffer and not of CURE®. This is also not supposed to be intended as medical advice.

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