My Post-Wig World

Once your hair really starts to grow after chemotherapy--not the horrible tack-like prickles, but this kinky, Little Orphan Annie hair, Little Orphan Annie after she stuck her finger in the electric socket, the wig starts getting itchier. When the weather's cold, you can stand wearing the thing, but on a warm sunny day, you'll feel as though a nest of lice was bedding down for a long season. 
So on the last day of the semester, I stopped at my friendly neighborhood hairdresser--hadn't seen her since early last summer, but she's been getting credit for the wig ever since I started wearing it. I told her she'd been getting credit for my hairdo and she looked puzzled, since she couldn't remember that style on me. I whipped off the wig and watched her eyebrows go up and her mouth go into a round "O" of shock.
I gestured to the poodle-gray mess creeping over my scalp like Kudzu over a landscape and asked, "Can you do anything with this?"
Fortunately, she laughed and asked to try on my wig. And yes, improvements could be made. I emerged from the salon an hour later with auburn hair, a shade too dark, but the gray is gone--slightly trimmed, too, so that it doesn't bush over my ears like a tonsure on an old monk. I can't say my current do is the fashion statement of my choice. But it's better than bald, folks--better than bald. 
To go with it, I have magic-markered lines and  few spiky little things with pentagram-like markings that I just got today from the technician who is arranging my radiation. I will get zapped along the markings, apparently, and I am not supposed to take a shower, so I will probably soon smell as creepy as this design looks (although I'm allowed to sponge off areas un-decorated by magic markers). Sid Vicious would be proud of me. At least I am on the home stretch: in five weeks I should be done with treatments, except, of course, for the pills. Buckets of 'em, over five years. On the bright side, I got to keep my breast, which has always been a big part of my fashion statement and many other statements.