Kathy LaTour is a breast cancer survivor, author of The Breast Cancer Companion and co-founder of CURE magazine. While cancer did not take her life, she has given it willingly to educate, empower and enlighten the newly diagnosed and those who care for them.

Kathy LaTour

I am bald again. Well, not completely but it looks like it did when it was two months of new growth after chemotherapy — except it isn’t as healthy. This time, according to my hairdresser, I hit the perfect storm of what causes hair loss. I had surgery on my foot twice, I had heart problems that cut my oxygen severely, I had a fast weight loss and I turned 70. Boy does it take me back when I look in the mirror, and, you know what, today I don’t care. Wigs today are so much better than they were, and I have two I can plop on and take off.

But when I lost my hair from chemotherapy it was a very different matter. It was probably the hardest thing I faced, because it was the visible reminder that I had cancer. My breast was replaced with a nice facsimile, but my hair was unique to me and then it was gone.

At 36 losing my hair was like adding insult to injury. I did positive imagery and decided I would be in the 5% who didn’t lose their hair. When my hair started falling out the 14

 day after my first chemo session I was devastated. It did provide a rather intimate moment when my husband shaved my head.

I find it funny when people ask why I would shave my head and not hang on to my hair for as long as possible. The reason, dear friends, is that the hair is not hanging on, it is falling out in your bed, in your clothes while cooking, in your car while driving and in your baby’s mouth while holding her. It was terrible, and I felt the easiest thing to do was just bite the bullet. But, hey, I had terrible hair, so losing it wasn’t as hard as it is for some women who really see their hair as their shining glory.

Hair falls out because many cancer drugs go after rapidly dividing cells, which are the intestine and hair follicles a well as cancer. Thus strong reactions -- read vomit and hair loss. For me much of my body hair never came back. I have to shave my legs once a year, and my underarms are clean as a baby’s butt — as is the other area close to my butt.

I bought one very expensive human hair wig, and let me tell you, the problem with human hair is that it acts like human hair, and you never know what it’s going to do. I developed a theory that women buy three wigs, one for what they want to look like, one for what they think they look like, and one for how they really look.

I did try to keep my hair, using what was available back then, which was a cold cap. Before starting chemo they crammed all my hair under what looked like a frozen swim cap. That lasted all of about three seconds before I started screaming to take it off. If you have ever had an ice cream headache you know how terrible it feels when your nose is on fire and freezing at the same time. Watching other women reading a magazine while freezing astounded me, but it was proof again that we are all different. What I didn’t like was them looking at me like I was a woos.

No way, no how. So I just shaved my head and got three wigs: One that hit me at the shoulders with a blonde streak down the side because I always wanted sassy long hair; one that was short and heavily frosted (or streaked), and one that was permanently curly that I could shake out and put on.

Well you can figure which one I wore every day, just giving it a good shake before putting it on. Scarves didn’t work either because to wear a scarf you have to have the correctly shaped head, which I don’t. I ended up looking like a peasant woman in a babushka (read scarf tied under the chin). My hair did grow back and it was actually thicker for a while. Today, age, hormones, and my perfect storm tell me it probably won’t grow back, and if it does it will be the same wimpy dishwater brown I have come to know and love.

Good luck, and if you can’t keep your hair, just remember it puts a bad hair day in perspective.

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"Good luck, and if you can’t keep your hair, just remember it puts a bad hair day in perspective."
 

Putting A Bad Hair Day Into Perspective

Not long after my book, The Breast Cancer Companion, came out I got a call from one of those afternoon talk shows. I didn’t even know who the host was, so I called a friend who was a TV critic. Her response was that this was a so/so show but depending on the “hook” for the episode, it might be OK. My agent was thrilled. Great publicity. Well, we’ll see, I said.

All the women I interviewed for the book had provided the most difficult feelings about family, love, hate and mortality in regard to their breast cancer diagnosis. It was my job to protect them from any abuse from the media.

Most had never been asked to do an interview and would in no way be ready to share many of the things they had gone through. They trusted me with information and feelings that were so private they often whispered them in the interview. Knowing all that, I wasn’t going to let some television producer rip them apart.

I called the producer back and asked her about the show’s focus. She explained that they had seen my book and wanted to explore “breast cancer issues” on the show.

Be more specific, I said. What’s the “hook.”

It was clear from the pause that she didn’t like that I knew enough of the lingo to ask that. Of course, this is how most of the tabloid TV shows get guests. They tell them vaguely what they will be discussing and then whamy— when they get on the show it’s a whole new ballgame.

I had had it happen to me in one of the first interviews I did on the challenges of silicone breast implants during a time when they had been shown to rupture.

My quote said something like, “ I think we need to compare risk to benefit when choosing a breast implant,” then I went on to say, that we needed to continue to research to determine what is safe and what isn’t. Well, they cut it at the first comma, making it sound like I was in favor of using implants made of anything and everything. When this one aired the next evening on a national news show, I sounded like I didn’t know what I was doing

“What exactly is your focus,” I said again to the producer working on the new show.

“Well we know from your book that there are women whose husbands left them when they got breast cancer and we wanted to talk to them about it,” so, could I give her the phone numbers of these women.

I only had to extrapolate a little to see the rest. Yeah, and then have the husband in the wings to talk about why he left and how losing a breast had been more than any man should take. Could sex be far behind?

This was my response. Cleaned up for family reading.

“First, I don’t do tawdry. There are so many real issues of breast cancer that to focus on this is ludicrous. Second, you are wrong. Most men I have encountered would have gone through the experience for their wives. I met men torn to pieces at the inability to protect their families from this disease. I met men whose pain was so numbing that it was hard to talk to them. Yes, there are men who left their wives, but that is not the norm. They were jerks before breast cancer and in most cases, cancer just gave them an opportunity to get out in what they saw as a reason society would, in its demented way, approve of. I also think there is a special place in hell for these guys.”

I continued, “Why don’t you do a show on women who threw men out after their diagnosis. Who found the strength to get out of a bad marriage when faced with mortality? As one woman said, ‘If I am going to die, I am not going to spend my last five years with that jerk.’ And invite the men who have fallen in love with women after they had breast cancer. Men for whom breasts were insignificant when it came to the woman and her spirit and character. Invite men who married the women they loved because they didn’t want her to go through it alone.” These men I would gladly tell her about.

Of course, this was not what she had in mind. We ended the conversation there, no need for tabloid TV. 

One cancer survivor details protecting the story of other survivors from those who would sensationalize it.
 

When TV Comes Calling

The breast cancer journey remains remarkable for its twists and turns— for the people, we meet along the way, and for the people, we become at those intersections where life meets cancer.

At diagnosis I was a woman afraid— driven by fear of death and dying before I could raise my child. She consumed my thoughts, and how she would live without me was constantly in the back of my mind. Fear of recurrence was my constant companion.

Then, five years after I was diagnosed, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. I was just at the brink of relaxing about my own diagnosis when I had to add our family genetics and its potential for ruining my daughter’s life.

When my mother was diagnosed, I became a daughter to a mother with cancer, forced to explore all the relationship issues and unfinished business that comes when a parent dies. How many daughters, I wondered, share their oncologist with their mother? How many daughters know with one look at a pathology report that their mother will die?

After my mother’s death I found that I had become an angry woman — a mother now determined to move people to action so my child would not suffer this fate. A Fearful woman, daughter woman, angry woman.

Of all the women I have become I like angry woman the most. Her clarity of purpose and power sometimes astounds me. Her focus is once again on her daughter, determined that she will not die of ignorance.

It’s harder sometimes to allow angry woman her power because she makes people uncomfortable. But I am finding that others like angry woman too— she is the one who gets things done.

Cancer changes us, and often we find new parts of ourselves that help us accomplish new goals in the face of adversity and tragedy.
 

Three Women: Fearful, Daughter, and Angry

I have a friend who has lost confidence in the healthcare system.

She says she is going to Mexico to be cured. After her first visit to a clinic across the border, she told me that her doctors in the United States didn’t give her any hope — the clinic in Mexico was filled with it. She knew she was dying but told me that she would rather die with hope than without it.

Why are doctors surprised that we seek shamans and miracles when some are so reluctant to say anything that might be construed as hope for a healthy future? This is particularly true now that we know a person’s mental state can impact their physical one.

Sure, their work is based on statistics and outcomes, but when will they learn that if they deliver that information with a little humanity —make us feel like they actually care if we get well, we might feel more positive. Instead they worry about being too positive for fear of many things. Are we expecting too much from doctors since they were trained in science?

The truth can be brutal — that’s why we run from it. But why can’t there be something more in medical science when the statistics are so bad, something that will nurture us to heal when we can’t have a cure. It’s what I find in support groups – caring. It’s offered in the psychosocial support we receive, the positive input we should be getting but aren’t.

I heard a rather long discussion about something called “false hope.” Evidently this is what doctors offer when they say positive things about the future knowing full well that there may not be one. But can’t qualify or quantify hope, so how can it be false?

When will doctors see that they are only half of what we need? The other half is the heart part, the place where someone gets to know us not as tumor but as people with hopes and dreams and plans.

Researcher Barbara Anderson, PhD, created a stress reduction program aimed at improving feelings of hope by reducing stress.

Patients are taught how to think about stress as well as communicate with doctors and others about their treatment, seek social support, become physically active and take other actions to reduce stress. Together these actions reduce stress, improve their mood and enhance their quality of life.

And how is this negative? It isn’t and it has been shown to improve patients sense of well-being, which is all anyone wants.

Hope is a tenuous thing, but it is important to foster hope during the cancer journey even when the statistic don't feel hopeful. 

Kathy LaTour

Putting A Bad Hair Day Into Perspective

When TV Comes Calling

Three Women: Fearful, Daughter, and Angry

Finding Hope During The Cancer Journey

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