My hair is falling out.
"I don't even have to ask how old your son is," my hairstylist said the other day, looking at her hairbrush.
You see, when you're pregnant, your hair and nails get super-thick (along with the rest of you.) After baby is born, you have a while before you're done with the shenanigans related to hormones. A few months down the road, you have a menopause-like shift that sheds that extra hair, and your hairbrush starts to look like something your cat coughed up.
Aside from when this happened after Oliver was born, the last time my hair fell out was a few weeks before I got married. Surely it was stress (and seriously? I was stressed about my wedding? I didn't know anything about stress back then. Planning a wedding sounds like eating ice cream to me now). I began to worry about how my hair might end up looking the day of our nuptials, so searched the 86 brands of shampoo that Target had to offer. Pantene Strengthening, which promised to coat each strand of my hair with superpowers, sounded promising.
Sometime soon after, I was eating a Subway sandwich loaded with pickles. Looooaded. I love me some pickles. (Whenever I go to Fuddrucker's, I load so many pickles onto my build-your-own burger that it outweighs the meat. I want a pickleburger topped with a little burger, thank you very much. At Subway sometimes I just want to be clearer about my wishes and tell them to load on the pickles until they can no longer close the sandwich.) I was eating alone in my apartment, because remember I wasn't married yet. I loved having my own place, but when I had moved in 4 years prior, I was occasionally terrified. I. Was. Alone. What if something happened to me? What if I choked? I envisioned myself running down the hall, desperately knocking on door after door, until I passed out blue in the hallway. No, that wouldn't work...I would have to pull up a chair and heave myself onto it for a self-Heimlich. And if that didn't work? Well, I guess I would just be one of those people found 4 days after they had died, because nobody was there to notice them missing.
Back to the sandwich. I swallowed a big bite of pickles, then felt a stray hair in my mouth that I had begun to swallow along with it. I fished around in my mouth for the hair, annoyed that my hair was still yet falling out. I found it, gave it a tug, and had a bizarre, horrendous sensation of my throat closing. My hair wasn't that thick- why would it choke me? This question was quickly followed by those visions of running down the apartment hallway, and I quickly swept my gaze over the room to locate a chair. Something told me to keep pulling the hair, and the sensation of being choked worsened for a second before I pulled out...a pickle slice, wrapped up several times in the knotted strand of hair. I took a huge breath, then stared gaping at the pickle, which was perfectly intact, swinging on the end of that stupid strand of hair. It then occurred to me: if that hair had broken when the pickle was still stuck in my throat, I would most certainly have choked. And maybe died, if the cheap dinner chair was ineffective in its heroic efforts. I could just see the headline: Bride to Be Found Dead in Apartment, 4 Days After Choking on a Sandwich Pickle.
That was one crazy strong strand of hair. It was the strenghthening shampoo, I deduced. It had to be! Pantene just may have saved my life.
I'm not alone anymore. I am so blessed with a house full of loved ones that are all expecting me to walk in the door. But never the less...pasta for dinner tonight.
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