Going green...

I am looking for a way to dye my hair green.  If you know how or can find someone to point me in the right direction, please let me know.

All my life, I have heard what thick hair I had.  To me, it has been somewhat of the bane of my existence, since all my life, I have wanted curly hair...or at least a poof on top of my head, swoops to the side, anything but the heavy weight that flattened my hair against the top and upper sides of my head before fanning out a bit.  Triangle head.  That's really the best way to describe it.  Short or long, but most especially long, the weight of my hair always foiled any real attempt to get some height to balance the fact that my head is proportionally smaller than my body.

I don't have to worry about that anymore.  In fact, day after day, I find that I am having another good hair day.  That is because shower after shower, I am leaving clumps of my hair behind.  With so little hair at this point, I can poof or swoop to my heart's content.

This started two years ago and then stopped once the nausea problem was resolved six or seven months.  However, my hair did not grow back as I was assured would happen.  I lost two, rather full, gallon-sized ziploc bags (at least what I caught from going down the drain) of hair before it stopped.  Over the course of the next year, I kept hoping to see small wispy growth, but it never began.  I resigned myself to no longer have think ropes as braids and was thankful I still had fairly good coverage.  A few months ago, last Fall, really, it started again.

Inexorably, I am losing my hair.  Something in me believes that it will not stop again.  Maybe for a time, but overall I will lose my hair for good far, far sooner than I would like. 

It is not just the hair on my head, which is strange beyond words.  For my driver's license photo, I wore make-up, which for the first time in my adult life I have not been wearing of late.  I was surprised to note that, relatively speaking, there are very few bottom eyelashes left on which to apply mascara.  Peering into the mirror (something I simply no longer do), I also saw that my "Brooke Shields" eyebrows, which I have long disliked, are no longer a problem.  Other parts of me are actually quite bald.

I, who cannot stand for her hair to be anything but freshly cleaned, have taken to washing my hair just twice a week.  I have to work up my courage to step into the shower and oft torrents of tears mingle with the bath water as I run a large comb through my hair to catch as much as possible to avoid clogging the drain. Or rather there used to be tears.  Now, there is mostly this deafening silence as the world around me recedes and I stare at what is strung across my fingers. 

Tonight, I wept again.

Tonight, I stood with the water pouring over my head and noticed that there is no longer enough hair to keep it a solid wall or sheet of hair hanging down each side of my face.  I am not sure how to describe it, but there were sort of wet spikes hanging down on either side, with gaping holes between them instead of two unbroken walls of hair. 

Will it last another year?  At this rate...perhaps.  Perhaps it will ease again and I will have far more time than I think. 

I have long said that I will not be one of those women hanging on to each and every lock, so that when there was not enough left to really look like a head of hair, out would come the razor.  Of course, I would need help with that.  I am not a very brave person.

I have also said that I wish to dye my hair green before that time comes.  If I am going to be bald, I ought to have a bit of fun at the end, eh?

Words have never come to truly explain what my hair means to me, though I have tried to write of it to others before.  It is a covering for my shame.  It is femininity.  It is the one positive attribute ever really noted.  It is me, the one with the long hair, especially since I frankly care not that my hair style is a couple centuries out of date.

I want a reason.  I do not have cancer.  There is no evil drug ravaging my body to fight a foe.  I mean, I am sure there is a reason, but it has yet to be identified. 

The first time round, the best answer was that another medication was blocking my thyroid medication and the slight change was enough to trigger the loss.  Another guess was stress, but, really, I've had many times great stress in my life before and never lost a lock.  Plus, during the time the losing eased, I would argue some of the most stressful days ever passed.  It could be the nutrition, but for all the weight I have lost and the relatively little I eat, my nutritional blood work has been okay, in large part because of the snail's pace metabolism I have now.  Could it be tied to my lowered heart rate and blood pressure?  Well, I cannot imagine that would be the case at all save for the fact that the theophylline is not really working anymore.  Or...perhaps it is better to say it is not working as effectively as has been the case in the past.  Whatever the reason, I need a lesson on how to dye my hair green. 

I do know that many women would be happy with the hair I have left.  They would find me quite churlish for even writing a single word about the sorrow filling my heart over the strings that now pass as braids.  Several people have tried to cheer me up by suggesting I get wigs of many colors so that I could be blond one day and red the next. Of course, being the utter coward I am, someone else is going to have to fetch those wigs.  Oh, how will I ever face that?

I doubt it would be any easier were this the only loss in my life.  But the fact that it is simply another loss, in a long line of losses dating back, really, the past three years, but primarily the past two, makes this burden heavier.  I have gained much, but I have lost much.  What I have gained, the sweet, sweet Gospel and deepening and new friendships, outweighs all the losses, but the gains do not change them or mitigate them or make them moot.  They still exist.

I do not want to lose my hair.  Mostly, I do not try to speak of it to anyone any more.  But tonight...seeing my hair separate into small sections instead of remaining a wide sheet...I could not turn away from how much this hurts and how hard it is to me.

I am weary of loss. 
This is a cruel world in the smallest of ways at times.
I am weary and I am weak.


Lord, I am Yours.  Save me.