The wonders of jagua

Jagua is a fruit-based temporary dye. It is not black henna, which is henna mixed with black hair dye, and can cause all sorts of nasty blistering and infection. No, jagua is no such animal. With a tube of jagua gel (and without using the little pointer tip until the end, because I was too lazy to go upstairs and look for it), I created a medusa on the top of N's new chemo-head. N is getting chemo, then surgery, then radiation. Then more surgery. I mention the lack of pointer tip, because without it, the gel came out too quickly and I think I wasted some jagua. In any case, it took a whole tube to form the medusa and snakes. This is how it looked when I finished:
I was copying freehand from a design and I think I made the medusa too friendly-looking. Here is how N looks from the front:

The pictures were taken when the ink was still wet. When the jagua dries, you peel it off and underneath it's like dark gray paint. It can last up to two weeks. When N sends me a photo of it after it's peeled off, I'll post it here.

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Here Comes the Fuzz

The thing is, we confuse recovery from chemo with recovery from cancer. Cancer doesn't always make you feel bad. As my friend R says, You're feeling great, then you find out you have cancer, and the treatment makes you feel lousy. So as my hair slowly grows back, I start to feel that I'm cured, that spring is in the air (though it's an autumnlike day, time to bring the basil crop inside). My scalp now feels like a tennis ball, according to my friend G., or peach fuzz, according to L. I have some dark stubs, too, on my scalp, along with a few wayward one-inch white hairs, and dark little dots on my otherwise pale eyebrow area, and my eyelashes are moving from sparse to less so.

My black head-decoration is wearing off in back. I will need a touch-up soon, though L says soon the fuzz on my head will keep the ink or henna from sticking. As if he knows. Even though I'm optimistic about the near-future return of my hair, I just sent off for more jagua AKA genipap ink, this time from a place in the UK instead of California, because of the lower price and the different shape of the container--a tube instead of a difficult-to-squeeze needle-nosed bottle.

The book "The Summer of Her Baldness" contains a sequence of photos of the author's hair re-growth. You can find something similar on this site, and here's the blogger's hennaed head. The blogger has since become a Christian-based life coach. (NOTE: The last two links aren't working at the moment.)

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