Back in 2018, when I was VERY bald, I looked forward to celebrating anything. I’d made it through treatment, and ohhh was I ready for anything that wasn’t deep, dark, and emotional and was outside of our apartment. A few weeks after chemo, I was feeling good and looked forward to traveling to go trick or treating with the nephews. This all was going down 3 weeks after finishing 6 rounds of EPOCH-R. The few stubborn pieces on my head had finally all fallen out and my eyebrows and lashes were baaaarely hanging on… I think the last ones fell a week later. I’d always heard that you lose your hair during treatment (but no one ever told you me you don’t actually lose ALL of it) so I did have stragglers for quite some time, obviously.
Quick note: I’d been cleared for travel and any activity that I felt up for – just had to make sure to not wear myself out too much. I felt comfortable going out for Halloween since I’d rested most of the day, and fortunately kids are done with hunting down candy relatively early.
As I dreamt up potential costumes, I got excited to take advantage of my shiny noggin. When else would I have this ‘style’ to work with, or not have to wear some awkward prosthetic bald head? I figured there was a whole world out there of unexplored costumes that weren’t easily accessible to me before my red devil chemo. When it came time to pull the trigger on plans though, I came up with nothing! Ok… so there were some things, but I was feeling super puffy (yay Prednisone!) and wanted something that was generally more forgiving.
Maybe it’s because most women have hair, but so I slowly came to figure out that aside from GI Jane, there weren’t a lot of costumes that easily came to mind (maybe chemobrain had a hand in this too). I’d eventually planned on going as 2007 Britney after she shaved her head and reacted against the paparazzi; especially since I already owned all of the costume pieces. As digested the idea and worked through my post-chemo emotional roller coasters, I felt more and more strongly though that I needed to go a different direction. It would be insulting and just plain weird for someone to be imitating me during one of my breakdowns… so I went back to the drawing board and finally settled on this one down below 🙂
I had a blast with the fam, and though it took a little explaining (maybe a prosthetic nose would have helped), we laughed and I enjoyed the costume. To help others that might be also facing this coming holiday with less hair than they might be used to, here are some ideas that I’ve pulled together to maybe help inspire you to have some fun this Halloween weekend! I know it is uncomfortable, but there is joy that can be found in this (typically) temporary stage of treatment. Pull some friends together and use this list for some group ideas too! Happy Halloween!
- Gru from the Despicable Me movies
- Deb from Empire Records (played by Robin Tunney)
- Skeleton from you know… human bodies (go all 360 degrees with the makeup!)
- GI Jane from GI Jane (played by Demi Moore)
- Nebula from The Guardians of the Galaxy & Avengers films (played by Karen Gillan)
- Ripely from Alien 3 (played by Sigourney Weaver)
- Evey Hammond in V for Vandetta (played by Natalie Portman)
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek (played by Patrick Stewart)
- Furiosa from Mad Max (played by Charlize Theron)
- Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers series (played by Mike Myers)
- Charlie Brown
- Morpheus from the Matrix (played by Laurence Fishburne)
- Walter White from Breaking Bad (played by Bryan Cranston)
- Professor X from X-Men (played by Patrick Stewart too)
- Uncle Fester from The Addams Family
- Venom from Venom series of movies
- Homer Simpson
- Any The Rock character
- Stewie Griffin from Family Guy