The Two Kinds of Decay

Hair

I did lose some hair, but no clumps. Or none that I noticed. Then again, I was too weak to lift my arms to touch my head, and my fingers were more or less paralyzed, and all the little muscles in my hands had atrophied. The pillows of flesh that had been on my palms, at the base of each thumb, had withered.

And so the nurses washed my hair for me. But washing a patient’s hair is a lower priority than reconnecting a line that has been pulled out of a vein by accident or on purpose, or defibrillating a heart that has arrested, so I didn’t ask for a shampoo very often.

When my college boyfriend came to visit me for the first time, he declared my condition greasy but stable.

After eight or ten days, a nurse would wash my hair for me, whether I’d asked her to or not. If I were paralyzed, this involved transferring me from my bed to a wheelchair, wrapping my central line in waterproof plastic, wheeling me into the shower, sticking my head into the stream of water, doing three or four shampooings, soaking the entire room, and pulling out what looked like pounds of my dead hair.

Sometimes a nurse wouldn’t want to deal with cleaning up such a mess, and she would wheel me down the hall to a rinsing sink, above which hung a sign that said something to the effect that it was not for patients’ use. But the rinsing sink was the perfect height for washing a slumped, paralyzed girl’s hair.

One nurse would wash my hair while another stood watch. Sometimes we got in trouble, but it was worth it. All the nurses had to do after washing my hair in the rinsing sink was to wipe it with a couple of towels, fold them so no one could see they were filled with hair, and throw them down the laundry chute.

God knows, the anorectics threw worse things down there.