Changes

Although to anyone else I look pretty much like Maureen, there are times I look in the mirror, with or without wig, and the face that stares back at me seems very strange. My eyebrows, while hanging in there, are very thin, and my eyelashes are mostly gone. Most of my life, although I don't go out in the sun, I've had some color. Right after chemo I'm ruddy cheeked but by week two of the cycle, I'm all one color, a kind of grayish-pale. The shadows under my eyes, always pretty dark, are darker. And I look older. Without a wig, since I'm all one color and bald, the effect is a little like a china doll head before it is painted and bewigged. If doll heads were dark under their eyes and had lines around their mouths.

I'm not a particularly vain person, but I'm not immune to vanity. I realized the other day that my raincoat, which doesn't fit me but which will fit me Any Day Now, is older than Adam and I am justified in buying a new one, whether I have really gotten all the wear out of this one that I can. I can't say I am much of a fashion and make-up maven. But aging visibly in four months is sobering. It's mortal, as in mortality, not as in elves and humans.

I know that some of this will reverse. My hair will grow back. I'll get color in my cheeks again. Some of the lines will reduce when I'm not being poisoned twice a month. I suspect that in some ways, I will be aged by the chemo and of course, all those things will come back over years, one way or another. It's one thing to know that intellectually, it's another thing to see it happening with surprising rapidity.

It's very science fictional to find that my mirror has developed the capacity to predict the future. At least some aspects of my future.

Bob is home today! We may yet get to go see Robots or something.