I am now 9 weeks since my last chemo (3 FEC then 3 Docetaxel) and thought my hair was growing back ok, even if I resembled a fuzzy-wuzzy badger. I had a head and face massage on Friday as a complimentary therapy, and the therapist said that my scalp was very dry with lots of dead skin (like cradle-cap on babies). She recommended massaging it with almond oil so I consulted the My New Hair salon who supplied my wig. They agreed and said to use the almond oil twice a week, leave it on for 2 hours and then wash off with an organic shampoo. The trouble is that although the dry skin comes off it contains hairs in it. Now I know that hair grows in cycles, and we would normally lose 100 hairs a day, and that if these hairs are washing off they are probably hairs that would come out despite this treatment - or are they?
Has anybody else experienced this problem with their scalp post-chemo and how did you remedy it?
Massaging the scalp should stimulate blood flow and encourage hair growth, not make my hair jump ship! Or am I expecting too much too soon - hair regrowth that is? Its just that my leg hair is coming along nicely!!!
although i used the cold cap during my chemo, i still lost around 50% of my hair including a large bald patch on the top. It started to grow back quite quickly but i too had cradle cap. hate to admit it but i just used to gently pick away at it (it then looked like a bad case of dandruff) and it seemed to clear within a week or so and didn’t return.
My hair is now a mixture of straight, waves, curls and kinks but thankfully is the same colour it was before although not stylish in the least!
I decided to contact a trichologist today, who advised that the almond oil would loosen the cradle cap, but to use an anti-dandruff shampoo to wash it off. I have bought some Simple shampoo and some E45 anti-dandruff shampoo, both of which are unperfumed and which should be kinder to my scalp than the bog-standard anti-dandruff shampoos that are around.
I am going to have another head massage tomorrow afternoon with the almond oil and then I will wash it off later on with the E45 shampoo so fingers crossed that it is only the cradle cap that disappears and not my hair!!!
I gave up on the cold-cap after 2 sessions as the don’t wash, don’t blow-dry, don’t colour regime required was not the look I desired - I looked worse than my mother on a ‘bad-hair day’ and that is bad! Well done for sticking with it though. How long did it take the bald patch to blend in with the rest of your hair?
I used ‘simple’ products all the way through my chemo and also afterwards. Thought it would be the best thing to do for the ‘PH’ balance and like you say, kinder to your hair.
The cold cap was awful but i found that once i’d started it, i didn’t want to give up on it. like i said, i did lose about 50% of my hair and because of this i still covered my head with a scarf because i was so embarassed about the bald patch. (the not washing, not combing thing was also awful). The thing that i kept in mind though was at the end of chemo the bald patch hopefully wouldn’t take long to ‘knit’ in and i would have some sort of ‘style’.
it was probably about a month until i was comfortable to not wear a scarf. i had the rest of my hair cut really short to give it chance to catch up so was a really short pixie style. it took about a month for my hair to stop shedding anyway after the last chemo. Now 7 months down the line, no-one can tell i’d lost my hair, it’s quite thick and maybe 3 inches long.
Touch wood, i never have to go through this again, but if i did, i’m not sure if i would opt for the cap again, but i was just too afraid at the time of being completely bald. Suppose i thought i could fight it, but not so.
Don’t worry too much about the cradle cap thing. i have a baby who had cradle cap at the same time as me and i just thought of it as nature’s way of protecting our scalps whilst the new hair was trying to grow through.
Thanks for you help on this one jo-jo. My head massage with almond oil and leaving it on for a couple of hours has almost cleared it so now I am dazzled by my nice, clean and shiney scalp! Just waiting for the hair to cover it up now and not cradle cap!
Did your cradle cap have bits of hair embedded in it too?
Do I take it that you had a very young baby to look after as well as having to endure chemo? i bet that that was tough, although an incentive to get through this though. You must be quite young yourself so hats off to you - well done
I used to wash my head with an Olay Daily Facial cloth every day and then I sprayed Body Shop Vitamin E moisturiser on it. It smells of rose petals and I found this routine very good for keeping scaly scalp away.