Beauty and fashion
Keep your skin beautiful and young looking!
Ever looked in the mirror and thought arrrgh?
After my first kidney failure, once I was well enough to move my head and have the nurses drag me up the bed a bit so I could be propped up. I looked in the mirror, my eyebrows had extreme dandruff, and my cheeks were flaking like an advanced case of sunburn without the red. I was a grey skinned zombie with yellow and red eyes.
Everyone who visited me that day had been saying, “You look so much better!” I hate to think what I must have looked like before, if what I saw in the mirror was looking “better” I must have looked terrifying.
Apart from the yellow and red eyes, most of this was due to simply due to dehydration.
I have had kidney failure several times. This tends to make me feel too nauseous to drink enough. Once I’m in hospital they put me on a drip to keep me hydrated, but even though they act quickly to get water back into me, I look absolutely dreadful for a few days. I turn into a living snowstorm. Dry crusts of skin flake off my face, legs arms and body. I take off a sock and dried skin puffs into the air.
Drinking enough fluid is important, I laugh at the models with their fancy bottles of water in the ads, but yeah they have a point. If I don’t drink enough fluid I quickly look like a hag. It doesn’t have to be water. In my case if I’m feeling too sick to drink water, it is often apple juice ice lollies. I find that sucking ice is one way I can stand taking fluid without feeling sick. My family make ice lollies for me and buy lots of ices and ice creams in case I am not well and can’t drink tea or water.
A friend on chemotherapy told me pineapple ice slush is also a good way of swallowing liquid if you feel nauseous.
Hair styling!
I was worried at first that my hair would fall out with the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. My doctor told me that the drug they would use for my chemotherapy didn’t cause hair loss. Then I had kidney failure and I couldn’t have chemotherapy anyway as without good kidney function it would just poison me.
The radiation treatment, yep my hair did fall out, but only from the waist down.
I didn’t have to shave my legs all that summer.
I really should have my hair cut. I like having hair that hangs down to my butt, but when I am ill it hurts my arms too much to brush and comb it, I can’t hold my arms up that long. It gets matted and I have to ask other people to comb it for me (like some of the lovely Severn Hospice volunteers). I go to a hairdresser to wash it sometimes, I’m not always strong enough to get in the shower.
I see other people in their tilted hats and dashing scarves, coping with their hairloss and I am ashamed of my vanity, but I’m putting off getting that hair cut until I really, really can’t cope.
Fashion!
The first thing I needed was a really warm dressing gown. I was spending a lot of time waiting in little cubicles in hospital robes for treatments and scans. They have to keep some of those rooms rather cool for the sake of the machinery. I was brrrr. I soon got used to lumping around a big cuddly dressing gown everywhere I went.
Of course a lot of hospital wards are very warm, and with the radiotherapy having fried my eggs, I was having hot flushes with my bum hanging out of a backless hospital nightie and sweating cobs in my cuddly dressing gown for the sake of modesty.
So I was lying on the bed with a sheet tucked over me, when I saw inspiration sashaying down the ward. She had just been for a shower and was walking down the ward with a towelling turban tucked round her hair, wearing an open backed hospital gown, but with a sarong tied around her waist. She looked like a princess, and whoever she was I thank her from the bottom of my heart.
Sarongs are brilliant! I tie them round my waist when I’m wearing a backless gown. I drape them over my knees when I have a short nightie and am in a wheelchair (long nighties don’t play nice with nephrostomy tubes) or when I put my feet up in a recliner. I wear them round the house when I have problems with my fistula and keep wetting myself, they are lightweight and wash and dry easily. I love my sarongs.
I came home from hospital after my first kidney failure and I had gone down four dress sizes in just over a month. Nothing fitted me. I was having to hold on the skirt I was wearing on my way home from hospital because the waistband was so big on my it wanted to fall over my hips and hit the floor.
My friend borrowed a wheelchair for me and we called in at a discount shop on the way home. I wasn’t strong enough to stand and try stuff on but we borrowed a tape measure and then grabbed and bought anything they had that would fit my new waist and be long enough to hide the catheter bag I had to wear strapped to my leg. Even if they would have stayed on my waist I couldn’t have worn any of my shorter skirts or straight legged trousers. Very galling when I had bought new outfits just a few weeks before going to hospital.
I’ve put the weight back on so those clothes don’t fit me now either. My weight goes up and down depending on how well I am at the time. I grab the occasional garment from a charity shop when I’m out shopping, but standing around and trying things on is awkward. For one thing getting dressed and undressed is tiring and makes my arms ache, a couple of changes and my legs would be shaking and threatening to wobble over. For another thing, with having to wear a catheter and having a fistula I am nervous of getting urine on the clothes. It’s easier just to buy really cheap clothes and put the ones that don’t fit to one side. The way my weight fluctuates they’ll probably fit sometime or other.
Jewellery always fits. I tend to tone it down a bit when I go to Severn Hospice because not everyone has my gruesome sense of humour, but I like to wear skeletal hands made of silver, fairy skeleton earrings and skulls. Its an act of defiance.
I saw a dress a few weeks ago with a boned bodice, the fabric was patterned with little pink skulls. It was really, really cute. I so would have bought it if the skirt had been long enough to cover my catheter bag.
Read other posts in Val’s diary here:
2 June 2010 – Hooray for corsets
3 March 2010 – It’s your funeral
24 February 2010 – So what is a stent?
10 February 2010 – A nice cup of tea
3 February 2010 The joys of negative thinking
26 January 2010 – My secret tattoos
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part II)
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part I)
6 January 2010 – Of vampires and vaccinations
17 December 2009 – How the Doctor kept me going!
11 December 2009 – Why am I not depressed?
4 December 2009 – Why I didn’t want to attend Severn Hospice!
