Noun: chemo cold cap

A 21st century torture device, designed for cancer patients who would like to avoid losing their hair during chemotherapy treatment.

 

Cold Cap Therapy involves applying a specially designed gel cap onto the head to cool the scalp.  Whilst wearing the cap, the blood vessels in the scalp are constricted, preventing damage to the hair follicles from chemotherapy, which can help to minimize hair loss.

​

For many people, losing their hair is the part of chemotherapy that they dread the most.  I guess it is a visible sign to everyone that you are ill.  And, for many of us, our hair is a big part of how we look and feel.

​

So, depending on where you have your treatment, you may be offered the use of a cold cap.  The cap has to be worn for about an hour before your chemotherapy treatment starts, and again for about an hour after it ends.  Use of the cap has varying degrees of success, and will depend on all kinds of things including what treatment you are having, your hair type and your head shape.  There will still be hair loss, to a greater or lesser extent, and you have to be very careful with your hair whilst you are having treatment as it will become quite fragile; i.e. no hair dye, straighteners, curlers, etc.

​

At first, using the cold cap seems like quite a simple thing to endure.  How hard can it be to keep a cold hat on your head?  You’ve waited at a bus stop in the snow for 40 minutes without a hat, right?  How much worse can it be???

​

Let me tell you, the size of your lady cojones can be measured by how long you can endure the arctic vice on your Barnet.  First of all they smother your hair in conditioner, and then they fit the cap onto your wet hair.  The cap is snug, to say the least.  Even before they turn on the freezer, you do wonder if your eyes are bulging ever so slightly out of their sockets.  Then the lovely nurse stands back and flicks the switch.  Oh my goodness!  Brain freeze doesn’t even go halfway to describing the next 10 minutes. Imagine drinking a slush puppy straight down, whilst sucking an orange ice-lolly, with your head in an upturned bucket of snow.   We are talking cold.

 

However, if you can get past that first 10 minutes or so, it does seem to ease off.  I don’t know if it is because the sensors in your brain that tell you that you’re in pain have frozen, but it does become bearable.

​

If you are going to try the cap, I would definitely recommend wrapping up warm for your chemotherapy session, even if it is the middle of summer.  You might feel a bit silly walking in dressed like Eddie the Eagle, but everyone will be laughing on the other side of their faces when you are nice and snug and they are shivering like Scott of the Antarctic.