What is Hair Today And Tomorrow?

HAIR TODAY AND TOMORROW developed from my own need, as a breast cancer patient, to find information about managing side-effects of chemotherapy. My personal goal was to try and get to the other side with as few long-term chemotherapy side effects as possible. I wanted to find out the things I could do to reduce the impact of chemotherapy. Cancer treatment is about more than survival, it is about surviving as well (mentally and physically) as we can.

Before my chemotherapy started, I spent a lot of time reading information from research articles, on-line support groups and websites. I wanted to put together a website for people with cancer in New Zealand to be able to find all this information in one place and for it to be in easily readable language.

As a doctor, I wanted the things I did during chemotherapy to be evidence based. This means that there’s been some research to show that something is worth doing. If things aren’t evidence based, then at least they needed to be cheap and cause no harm.

One thing I knew, was that I wanted to try and stay as much like “me” as possible through chemotherapy. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to try and keep my hair. Some people seem to embrace the bald look, but I didn’t think I would be able to do that easily. For me, losing my hair would be a big source of grief. It also seems that hair loss could cause grief for people close to me as well. My hair is nothing special, but it's my hair and it’s me. I was also aware that it would take years for my hair to grow back to shoulder length. I have had shoulder length hair or longer all my life and it is part of who I am. Even knowing there was a risk I could lose my hair no matter what, I wanted to know I had tried the things I could control. To both try and keep some of my hair and improve the quality and speed of future regrowth.

As a psychiatrist, I was particularly interested in the impact of chemotherapy hair loss on mental well-being. Women in my breast cancer support groups talked about their hair loss grief and how they didn’t feel like themselves without hair. Hair loss makes them feel like a sick, cancer patient and tells the world that’s what they are. I wanted to understand more about the impact of hair loss and cold capping on mental well-being.

One of the other things that worried me most about chemotherapy was developing nerve changes in my hands and feet, which could be permanent. This could affect my ability to function, because hands and feet working properly is so important for things that we all do every day. I wanted to find out ways to reduce the chance of peripheral neuropathy (hand and feet nerve changes).

One thing I noticed was the big difference between different countries and even different chemotherapy centres in the same city. Some things were standard in one place, and not even considered in others. For example, some chemotherapy clinics provide ice products for hands and feet as a standard practice and others don’t even mention it to patients.

Cold capping is something that is pretty much standard treatment in the UK but is uncommon in New Zealand. There are only four scalp cooling machines in the whole country and chemotherapy patients are rarely informed about cold capping as an option. I found some information on the Breast Cancer Foundation website but there was minimal information about accessing cold capping in New Zealand or whether it would even work.

From my research, I’ve found that the first step in making cold capping available to all New Zealanders is to increase awareness, and therefore demand for the service. I hope this website provides a useful resource for finding information in one place. I hope that my HAIR TODAY AND TOMORROW project can help people know that cold capping exists.

Many people have helped with HAIR TODAY AND TOMORROW. Friends have donated their time to make the website and the logo and offer support in a variety of ways. It was a one-person idea, but it took a team to get it to work.