Every October, the New England fall landscape is interrupted by splashes of PeptoBismol pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  After a month of nothing but pink ribbons, posters, socks, cell phone covers, tea bags, underwear, flip-flops, pens…I am ready for October to end.  

After all, it’s not like I need an increased awareness of this disease; I live with it every day.  This morning when I woke up with muscle aches so diffuse, it hurt to chew toast for breakfast, I was again made aware of breast cancer. And when I finished breakfast and stood in front of the mirror to brush my teeth, my bald head was another reminder of this stupid disease.

That’s probably been the worst chemo side effect– the baldness.  I can hide the scars on my chest, the circles under my eyes, the bone pain I get after chemo, but I can’t hide my head.  Whether I’m wearing a hat or a wig, I always feel like I’m wearing a sign advertising my struggle.

Also, the reason I hate not having hair is because of the awkward conversations it has led to.  Two months after I finished the first round of chemo, my hair had finally grown enough to cover my scalp.  One morning when I left my apartment to run errands, I decided that today was the day I would venture out into public without any covering on my head — no hat, no scarf, no wig.  Just me. 

 As I was getting out of my car in the parking lot of the grocery store, a woman I’d never seen before made a bee-line from her car to mine and cornered me.  “Did you do your hair like that on purpose???” she asked loudly. 

I was too stunned to speak.  I made my way past her and into the store, using all my energy not to cry.  I realized that such a short hairstyle left me open to many interpretations: militant feminist, butch lesbian, and who knows what else, but did someone have to say it out loud?

That day I began to have a new understanding of breast cancer awareness– not an awareness of the disease itself, but an awareness I’ve gotten from the disease that gives me a more gracious perspective of the human conditon.

 I thought of the angry glances I’ve given to the mothers of scream toddlers in the grocery store, the eyebrows I’ve raised at the woman on my street who sells wilted carnations to afford the $2/night charge at the homeless shelter, the subtle head wagging I’ve done to a patient of mine who comes in regularly with alcohol-induced health issues.   It has been so easy to assume the worst about people.  But after my experience, I know what it’s like to have the worst believed — and said — about me.

No, I didn’t choose my hairstyle.  I didn’t choose this disease.  I didn’t choose the scars on my chest.  But I have to live with them anyway.  And lots of other people didn’t choose the faces that they have to present to the world — but they have to wear them anyway.

This year, I’m ending breast cancer awareness month with an awareness that life is hard and unpredictable and often out of our control.   And all of us — from the bald cancer patient to the exasperated mother to the homeless person to the alcoholic — could use just a little more grace.