

Keeping Your Hair in Chemo - DiabloD3
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/03/09/keeping-your-hair-in-chemo/?_r=1&referrer=

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idlewords
My girlfriend tried this when she was getting chemo. The logistics were pretty
daunting - buy a cooler full of dry ice in the morning, show up at the
hospital, and then keep changing caps on the half hour, out of a huge wheeled
Igloo cooler. We had to monitor their temperature with a big gun-style IR
thermometer, and it was very difficult to keep them in the range where they
were both still pliable and cold enough to be effective.

Cold caps were an excellent way to make an already miserable experience much
worse. She gave up after three chemo sessions.

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_sword
My mother used a cold cap when undergoing chemo during treatment for breast
cancer. She kept her hair, although it thinned quite a bit, throughout
treatment. She read about it extensively, understood that it is not as well
accepted in the US, that it could carry additional risks, but the dignity (and
hair!) that she retained during treatment was tremendous. I won't go into too
many details, but I will say that she went through treatment and has gone more
than two years without any reappearances of anything. She both caught it early
enough (of course key) and had access to some of the best doctors available at
Sloan Kettering.

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OneOneOneOne
I think this is well worth the cost. Watching someone you love dealing with
hair loss on top of chemo is just heart breaking.

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_sword
It is worth emphasizing the cost in this case. My family is fortunate enough
to be able to both access excellent healthcare and pay for the complete cold
cap procedures (which included a trained specialist who would apply and
maintain the cold cap). I hope, sooner than later, that we will be able to
offer this as a standard part of many chemo treatments.

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rozza
My wife was offered it by insurance in the UK and she refused it. She hates
being cold, so when she read that its not always effective she decided against
it. Some hospitals also offer cold gloves, to save your nails.

Everyone is different and for some people the losing your hair is a huge loss
on top of an already shitty situation, so anything that helps people through
it is a good thing.

My wife ended up bald and for once in our marriage we shared the same hair
cut! Gutsy lady, I remember the tears when the clumps started to fall out but
she stoically put it behind her, whilst chemo wreaked its chaos. Time passed
and now she has "chemo hair" and its still full of curls a year after the
weekly chemo finished.

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Glyptodon
When I had chemo (Leukemia) parts of my hair turned a copper-ish red and other
parts got a weird waviness, and it thinned somewhat, but it never was anywhere
close to falling out.

Forehead thermometers also always measure my body temperature a degree or two
too low.

Taken together, I wonder if that means I've got a naturally cool scalp which
somehow protected my hair from falling out.

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zrail
This is neat. Hopefully it'll become more accepted and covered by insurance.

Different drugs do different things. My chemo specifically targeted fast
growing cells in the body, including testes (where the cancer originated) and
hair follicles. Every hair on my body fell out. When it grew back, it was
curlier than normal for awhile, and my beard came back a different color, but
that's pretty much all gone now two years on.

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civilian
From an anti-materialistic point of view, huh? Hair is a cosmetic feature and,
given the other problems in the situation, I feel like making sure you keep
your hair is kind of silly.

From an economic point of view though, there's easy evidence that hair has a
high value based off of how much people (especially women) put into it's
maintenance, via luxury shampoo/conditions, haircuts, hair styling, etc. So
it's not surprising that saving one's hair would be worth the $2,000 average
cost, plus the labor of switching them.

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qiqing
Privacy > Cosmetics

If you lose all your hair, everyone knows you have cancer, whereas if you have
your hair, you can choose who to disclose that information to. The proximal
difference may be the unsolicited comments (most of them well-meaning, but
still jarring), but there are probably more that I haven't thought of because
I haven't walked a mile in their shoes.

Even so, I imagine it would easily be worth $2K to me to not have a glaring
billboard that advertises my physical ailments publicly where ever I go. (I'm
visualizing wearing a t-shirt that says "I have strep throat/whooping cough,"
but you know, more serious...)

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tenken
So will cold caps stop male pattern baldness?!!? .... I'm asking because a
friend wants to know, yup that's who .... and i'm sticking with it :P

Meh. a sister who is under 40 needs estrogen shots now, and I regularly use
Rogaine -- the things we do to appear "normal".

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rurban
Wish I had knewn this before. Too late now.

