I have become a woman who sleeps with her head wrapped in a towel. Specifically, I'm a menopausal bald woman who sleeps with her head wrapped in a golf towel. Who knew that the quick dry sports towel was the exact size to fit around my cranium, leaving a tiny tuck in that secures it just enough for me to drift off into sleep, or at least a hormone lite sleep, which finds me up and down, asleep and awake, throughout the night.

Nobody warned me about the collision of chemotherapy and menopause. Post hysterectomy, the first sign of the approaching 'change' was a slight heating of the top of my head, which I thought was kind of cute and a bit like wearing a yarmulke, or Jewish skull cap. 'I don't know what millions of women are complaining about,' I thought sniffily. 'Hot flushes are nothing.' Ha! Days later my body began unleashing huge surges of heat that left me covered in sweat. I look back to those halycon days with true nostalgia, as being relatively hairless has introduced me to the real meaning of the phrase 'dripping in sweat'.

I'm not completely hair free. My hair does grow back in between treatments, managing a fair imitation (I hope) of male pattern baldness. And there's the stubborn pubes that have remained belligerently in evidence outside my 'bikini line'. But for the main, I'm a satiny smooth creation - all the better for water to roll off, and it does. Day and night.

I never realised that hair was so useful. I've always thought of it as ornamental, or stubbornly growing in the wrong places. But a lack of nose hair means that I must be ever vigilant for nasal drip, especially in cold weather. And a bald head beaded with sweat is just wrong, even when it's mine.

As for the emotional car crash of chemo and menopause.... 

I've tolerated the Doxorubicin really well, physically, and I know I am so lucky in that respect. It's emotionally that I haven't been able to cope with it. I think finding out I had cancer nine months after being made redundant has been really difficult. It's completely rocked my understanding of who I am and I feel like both experiences coming back to back have chipped away my identity. I know it's short term - I do my last chemo next Wednesday and I can't wait - but the experience has been shocking in so many different respects.

Undertaking a chemotherapy regime, for me, has been like walking into a waiting room that's been hiding in plain view. I know, intellectually, that life is experiential, and that I don't 'get' most things until it happens to me in a direct manner. I was fit and healthy and then overnight I wasn't. It still shocks me at how quickly this happened, and selfishly, that it happened to me. 

I hope that when I'm through all this and can worry about 'normal' things, like being fat, or not having enough time to do everything, that I don't. From my seat in the chemo waiting room it seems such a waste of energy. I want to keep hold of the big picture - or I could just keep wearing the golf turban.