This past January, I was eating grilled cheese (tomatoes removed) across from Greg The Doctor in the Bennington dining hall, and suddenly he was staring above eye level. A disturbed expression clouded his normally optimistic features. "Andrea, is your hair thinning?" he asked.
"WHAT?!" I instantly flipped out, my hands flying to the top of my head. My hair had always been thick, and was the only part of my body I liked being thick. When I used to go to places that charged more than twelve dollars a haircut, the stylist would insist upon drying my hair, so she could admire her finished product. And then, midway through drying my hair, she would openly bemoan having to dry my hair, since it was so thick that I was cutting into her Chinese chicken salad lunch break. My hair was so thick that my ponytail pummeled the life from strong rubber bands until they were limp as ramen noodles. My hair was so thick that it was thicker than yo momma's thighs.
For the duration of the residency, I had Greg The Doctor look at my scalp in every possible light. Outside, on an overcast day, I asked, "Does my hair look thin right now?" Greg The Doctor humored me, then looked puzzled. "No. Actually, your hair looks fine out here."
"SHIT!!!!!" I said. "How the fuck am I supposed to know if my hair is really thinning if I can't get a definitive answer?"
"Don't worry about it so much," said Greg The Doctor, who, incidentally, works with thick kids. "I think it was just the light in the dining hall. It was hitting your head in a way that created an illusion."
"But maybe it wasn't an illusion," I said like a movie character who's just awakened from an Oz-type dream, but, upon going to her dresser and finding a piece of Scarecrowish straw, says, wide-eyed to the camera, "But maybe it wasn't a dream."
We went into the artificial light of the lecture hall. "What about in here, Greg The Doctor?" I demanded. "Does my hair look thin now?"
Greg The Doctor was too nice to say, "Chill the fuck out, bitch," but he gave me a "Chill the fuck out, bitch" look. "I told you, I think it was just an illusion. But if you're really worried, go get your thyroid checked."
So when I got home, I ran to the doctor for a full blood panel, which says a lot about how integral a full head of hair is to my personal identity because I won't even go to the doctor when I have phlegm blocking all breathing passages, mysterious, spreading rashes, and a fever nearing two thousand degrees. More specifically, I went to my gynecologist, since I didn't have a real doctor, due to the aforementioned reluctance toward seeking help. (But you've always got to help your hey-hey. No choice there).
A nurse led me to an open nook, where a pregnant woman was already waiting. "Go ahead and take a seat," said the nurse, leaving me and Eight-Months-Along alone. I took two fingers and bounced them along my part, trying to see how buoyant my roots were. They felt nice and thick, like batting running around my head, but how could I trust my own perception? I'd been looking in the mirror every day for months, and had never noticed any changes in my do. I'd noticed the scrapes on my knees taking forever to heal and the increasingly poor quality of my nails, but nothing fishy going on up top. I looked over at the pregnant woman. Maybe she could give me an unbiased opinion.
"Can you tell me--" I started, and she turned her head, giving me the smile that gooey pregnant woman give when they're way too eager to answer things like, "Can you tell me why babies smell so gosh-darned good?" And then I didn't want her opinion anymore when I saw she was one of those, so I finished with, "If the blood-tester nurse said she'd be back soon?"
The walls of the nook were plastered with photographs of patients' babies, and I studied their little heads. One tiny guy had, basically, an infant comb-over, and I thought, "Is that what's in store for me? Is that my future?" There was another picture of a toddler cuddling a fuzzy tabby cat, and I admired the cat's thick coat. I started to feel jealous of the cat.
The nurse finally came in to take vials and vials of my blood, and I stared deep into the syringe, trying to see if my fluid looked at all strange. Baldish? When the results came back the next day, my gynecologist called to tell me that there absolutely wasn't a thyroid problem. I didn't trust her, since she dealt mostly in hey-hey's. So I decided it was finally time to get myself a general practitioner for the first time since adolescence.
My new general practitioner's office looked like an industrial loft, with concrete floors and exposed piping. "This is the office of someone," I thought, "who can surely get to the bottom of the thinning issue." This was the office of someone into serious, bare bones problem solving.
While sitting on the examination table at the end of a very long, very narrow, very otherwise unfurnished room, I told my new doctor my biggest concern. "You take a look," I said, bowing my head. "You can be completely honest." My new doctor combed through my hair as slowly as if she were counting lice. I held my breath like David Blaine. After a stretch of quiet, she stepped back and shrugged. "Your scalp's perfectly healthy. I don't have anything to compare your current amount of hair to, but I don't see any signs of thinning."
"Well, maybe we should check my thyroid one more time," I suggested.
"Or maybe-- we could talk about your diet?" she countered.
At which point I had to admit to her that I partook of a piece of fruit approximately once a month, and the only time I laid my hands on vegetables was when I dropped carrots and lettuce leaves into my bunny's cage at the end of each night. My new doctor gazed at me as if I was a undiscovered strain of flu and, in an unsettled voice, told me, "I'm giving you the name and number of a nutritionist."
But I'm too cheap and lazy to go to a nutritionist, so I drove back from my new doctor's and went straight to Ralph's Fresh Fare. I entered the produce section like I was entering Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, a place so alien, secret, and undiscovered (at least to me) that I had to tread slowly, overly bewildered by all the colors and smells. Other shoppers haphazardly grabbed apples and threw them into clear bags, but I palmed the fruit, trying to understand its nutritional soul. "Take this home," I commanded myself, "And put it in your mouth. They say it will do good things for you." The apple went into my cart. So did the pears, the grapes, the oranges, the strawberries. Then I went to the sprinkler section and got my usual carrots and lettuce for the bunny, except this time, they were for me, too.
A month later, I am now daily consuming at least four servings of fruits and vegetables a day, even though I know I'm supposed to be at five. (Baby steps.) In about a month I return to Bennington for the summer term, and one of the first orders of business will be finding Greg The Doctor so he can join me in the dining hall, where I will stick the top of my head in his face, and ask, "Does my hair look thick to you?" Then I will ask, "And also very, very shiny?"
First announcement: the new, minimalistic To Feel Stuff themed author website is now up. Be sure to roll over the homepage pillbox with your mouse for a play-by-play instructional on how to toss and turn. Also, strangely enough, when I put up the material for the "About The Author," section, I thought my hair was on its way to being healthy, but--
is much closer to being healthy today than it was when I took that quiz a month ago. Anyway, the second blog isn't going to be a regularly updated blog because, as I explain there in nicer, Amazon-approved language, how many fucking blogs do I really have to have to get people to be aware of my shit!? But I'm doing my best to reach out to people who maybe don't go anywhere else on the internet besides Amazon.com, and so I'll be posting there every so often because maybe it will remind someone to put me in his/her shopping cart. You can see the blog by going here, or by visiting either one of my books on the site.