10,352 Hairs

I shaved around my mohawk again today. My hair is thinning, but the sparse healthy hair follicles are still growing hair out of them. Because my hair is thinning and the area my mohawk covers is a small portion of my head, I decided it would be feasible to estimate the number of hairs I have remaining after shaving and chemotherapy. Beneath the tip of my index finger in the thick part of my mohawk, I counted about 25 hairs. I then estimated a grouping of index-finger-tip-size chunks in a stripe laterally across my mohawk. Then I estimated the number of stripes accross my mohawk. I am pretty sure I have about 7,352 (+- 3,000) hairs remaining on my head. I have to give some room for error on that, though, because of the inopportune placement of my eyeballs relative to the posterior surface of my head. I took a glance at my chest and I think there is a few thousand more there so, excluding my leg hairs, I probably have 10,352 hairs on my body.

I had not looked so closely at myself in a while, so today while I was looking at my Chia Pet of a head I noticed my face and an unfortunate allignment of facial anomalies. The injury to my face from the stationary door that hit me created two small superficial cuts on my nose, about half an inch apart. They look like normal skin imperfections. The unfortunate coincidence is that there is an actual skin imperfection on my upper right forehead, in the form of zit (hopefully a benign growth), that lines up with the other two nasal lacerations such that you could take a protractor and draw a line connecting all three. Geometric configurations on a person's face are never good for vanity, but after you go through the polymorphosis of chemotherapy, you fortunately shed most image-related self-consciousness. I am more tan now, and I actually look pretty good for a cancer-patient (truthfully, the dots on my face are fading with the tan and with washing), which is just in time for them to poison me again this Wednesday for Round 4: Pillaging the Cancer Village for Remaining Cancer Children and Burning Them Alive Inside Their Grass Cancer-huts.