Keeping Your Hair in Chemo

My girlfriend tried this when she was getting chemo. The logistics were pretty daunting - buy a cooler full of dry ice in the morning, show up at the hospital, and then keep changing caps on the half hour, out of a huge wheeled Igloo cooler. We had to monitor their temperature with a big gun-style IR thermometer, and it was very difficult to keep them in the range where they were both still pliable and cold enough to be effective.

Cold caps were an excellent way to make an already miserable experience much worse. She gave up after three chemo sessions.

My mother used a cold cap when undergoing chemo during treatment for breast cancer. She kept her hair, although it thinned quite a bit, throughout treatment. She read about it extensively, understood that it is not as well accepted in the US, that it could carry additional risks, but the dignity (and hair!) that she retained during treatment was tremendous. I won't go into too many details, but I will say that she went through treatment and has gone more than two years without any reappearances of anything. She both caught it early enough (of course key) and had access to some of the best doctors available at Sloan Kettering.

My wife was offered it by insurance in the UK and she refused it. She hates being cold, so when she read that its not always effective she decided against it. Some hospitals also offer cold gloves, to save your nails.

Everyone is different and for some people the losing your hair is a huge loss on top of an already shitty situation, so anything that helps people through it is a good thing.

My wife ended up bald and for once in our marriage we shared the same hair cut! Gutsy lady, I remember the tears when the clumps started to fall out but she stoically put it behind her, whilst chemo wreaked its chaos. Time passed and now she has "chemo hair" and its still full of curls a year after the weekly chemo finished.

When I had chemo (Leukemia) parts of my hair turned a copper-ish red and other parts got a weird waviness, and it thinned somewhat, but it never was anywhere close to falling out.

Forehead thermometers also always measure my body temperature a degree or two too low.

Taken together, I wonder if that means I've got a naturally cool scalp which somehow protected my hair from falling out.

This is neat. Hopefully it'll become more accepted and covered by insurance.

Different drugs do different things. My chemo specifically targeted fast growing cells in the body, including testes (where the cancer originated) and hair follicles. Every hair on my body fell out. When it grew back, it was curlier than normal for awhile, and my beard came back a different color, but that's pretty much all gone now two years on.

From an anti-materialistic point of view, huh? Hair is a cosmetic feature and, given the other problems in the situation, I feel like making sure you keep your hair is kind of silly.

From an economic point of view though, there's easy evidence that hair has a high value based off of how much people (especially women) put into it's maintenance, via luxury shampoo/conditions, haircuts, hair styling, etc. So it's not surprising that saving one's hair would be worth the $2,000 average cost, plus the labor of switching them.

So will cold caps stop male pattern baldness?!!? .... I'm asking because a friend wants to know, yup that's who .... and i'm sticking with it :P

Meh. a sister who is under 40 needs estrogen shots now, and I regularly use Rogaine -- the things we do to appear "normal".

Wish I had knewn this before. Too late now.