For as long as I can remember, my hair was a struggle. My hair was always really thick, so it was an ordeal to wash it, detangle it, and dry it. Add the fact that I was (and still am) painfully tender-headed. My mother hated dealing with it. My grandmother hated dealing with it. That’s why in almost every picture of me as a small child, I have one or two pom poms or braids. Every summer, my aunt Hattie would cornrow my hair. I hated the process, but I got pretty beads…and no one had to touch my hair for weeks, which everyone was thankful for.
The other solution was to relax my hair to make the texture more manageable. I don’t remember how old I was, but we’d occasionally go to the salon to get our “perm,” but more often than not, Mommy would apply the FabuLaxer to our hair at home. When I became a teenager, I started to relax my own hair. Despite the chemicals burning my scalp, I always want to leave it on a little longer, to get my hair as STRAIGHT as possible. Even as I was going through college, studying chemistry and biology, I ignored what I was exposing myself to. And I continued this practice for years.
Until recently, I’d worn extensions in my hair 3 times. The first time, I was about to have surgery and would not be able to lift my arms very high for a period of time. I decided to go to South Philly and get braids put in. It was a long, painful process. My scalp hurt for days. There may have been some tears. I said never again. I also got sew-in weaves on 2 occasions: my wedding and my cousin’s wedding. I wanted to make sure that I had nice hair for pictures, but soon after the weddings, the hair was gone. Until recently…
So why my change of heart, and look? In early 2021, I began to have some strange abdominal symptoms. I would feel full after a few bits of food. Sometimes, I felt like there was “something” in there. I went to my PCP, who totally dismissed it. But I knew something was off. When I went for my annual GYN appointment, I mentioned this to Dr. Hanes. He felt my belly and suspected that I had an umbilical hernia. He gave me his guess on size and location and then referred me to a General Surgeon. I was sent for a CAT Scan. Sure enough, Dr. Hanes was correct on the size and location of the hernia. I was scheduled for robotic hernia repair surgery in May 2021. But wait… There was more… The scan also revealed a number of uterine fibroids that required further evaluation.
After my hernia repair was completed and I was healed, it was now time to go back to Dr. Hanes to deal with the fibroid situation. Yes, I’d noticed that my periods had gotten heavier and my cramps were bad, but I attributed it to getting older and being perimenopausal. Then things progressed to cramps so bad, I would vomit. Heavy bleeding was an understatement. Dr. Hanes did an internal ultrasound and confirmed several fibroids. We decided that an exam under anesthesia and removal of the fibroids was the best, most conservative approach. So, in June 2022, I underwent this procedure, hoping for the best. And here we are in January 2023, and things are not much better. So now I have a decision to make…another procedure and hope it gets me through to the inevitable menopause, or a hysterectomy, which is not something I take lightly for many reasons.
So, what does all of this have to do with hair? There’s scientific evidence that supports a correlation between black women who relax their hair and the development of uterine fibroids, specifically, that black women develop uterine fibroids at a 2-3 times higher rate than white women (Click here to read the article). Knowing what I know about human biology and chemistry, I find it absolutely plausible that my fibroids could be partly due to relaxing my hair for the past 35+ years…sometimes as frequently as every 6 weeks. I’ve decided that is not a chance that I am willing to take. Instead, I’m opting for protective hairstyles while the relaxed hair grows out. Then maybe I will rock my natural hair…or maybe I will keep reinventing myself every six weeks because this is kinda fun 😏
Now that’s a lot of hair! You look marvelous