Revenge of the Scottish Eyebrow

It seems that I have wee traces of hair coming back in. And that’s pretty exciting.
Oh sure, it may not be exciting for you, but let me tell you, it’s exciting for me.

And I have to say that through this whole process, my “Scottish eyebrow hair” has shown amazing stamina and just wouldn’t quit or fall out.
Now, back in the days of regular hair growth, I would, on occasion, have these wild eye brow hairs that grew with a mind of their own. My g-f refers to these hairs as Scottish eyebrow hairs and she would always rip them out by the follicle, with a huge amount of glee.
But it’s strange how even some mutant hair can end up on your own personal endangered species list. And so this little hair has remained while all the others have fallen to their death.

And now, as you can see, the other eyebrow hair is starting to grow back.
Now, the hair is probably in for a rude surprise when I go for the last chemo treatment next week, but I am hopeful that the chemo won’t do a total clearcut of my little hair sprouts and I can start rebuilding with a bit of a, dare I say, headstart.
That’s my hope.

On other fronts, I went for bloodwork yesterday.
That was sort of interesting and sort of funny.
See, I used to be on a 3 week cycle, so I would do a batch of bloodwork, and then the next week they would do bloodwork again, and the day after that I would get a chemo treatment.
At least that was how I was doing the calculations.
And then last time, they switched me to a 4 week cycle so that shifted things a bit. So, imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I looked at my day planner and saw that I was supposed to have done my first batch of bloodwork on Oct.29th and here it was November 2nd.
Oops.
So, off we went to do that.
Seems they want the blood 2 weeks after the last treatment rather than one week before the next treatment.
Who knew?
Certainly not I.

I also had an interview with a lovely woman from the Hereditary Cancer Research program. We had a really good talk about genetics and her research and the politics of cancer versus the politics of AIDS and her work and my work.
I liked her. She was great.
And, now I have to go get a bunch more blood drawn because they have to test me to see if I have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation.
Those 2 genes have been shown to “be responsible for some hereditary breast cancer and some hereditary ovarian cancer”
Anyway, I am going to have 4 more vials of blood taken at some point in the future and it will take them about 6 months to figure out if I am a carrier for the BRCA genes. And then I will need to figure out what I do next, because that would be a whole new ball game, and frankly, I am not completely ready to go there just yet.
But it *is* important to do this so my sister and my nieces can make the decisions they need to make.
I’d like to think that I got in this situation from standing too close to the microwave or from the nasty chemicals I was exposed to when I was treeplanting 20 years ago.
The idea that my sister and my nieces may have to deal with this, that’s just a totally depressing concept.

But it is going to take a while before I even let them take the blood, and then a half year to get the results, so if you want to know how that one turns out, you’ll have to stick around for the long haul.