It did help that it had a name, I suppose, so we knew what we were up against. But I still felt pretty miserable

As told to Devorah Grant

IT

started slowly. So slowly that I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening at all, even when my hairbrush was just that little bit too full, and my hair just that little bit too thin. But slow became faster, then faster still, and one evening found me staring in the mirror at a large, round bald spot in the center of my scalp. It was a girl’s worst nightmare; I was losing my hair.

“Alopecia areata,” my doctor said crisply, as I sat trembling in that cold metal chair. A medical skeleton in the corner stared menacingly down at me. “It’s an autoimmune disease attacking Rina’s hair follicles. The hair may or may not grow back.” I looked at Ma with big, glassy eyes, and zoned out as she asked all the questions I couldn’t. Frozen to the spot, I had to be practically pushed out the door. Was this really happening?

It did help that it had a name, I suppose, so we knew what we were up against. But I still felt pretty miserable. Shower nights would find me looking helplessly down as large clumps of black hair gathered in a whirlpool at the drain, then disappeared into the abyss, never to be seen again. At first, going out meant ages in front of the mirror — brushing my hair this way, then that, asking my long-suffering siblings, “Is the spot covered? Now?” But when it became “spots,” in plural, this no longer worked.

I began to hate mirrors with a passion. I cried when I woke up in the morning and found tufts of black hair on my pillow. I patted and stroked them, then threw them away with a vengeance, never knowing what I was angry at — the hair, the disease, my head? People asked my mother and my sisters if I was sick; had I heard of this treatment or that? I threw tantrums at having a nisayon that everyone could see, that did not seem to be going anywhere, despite vitamins and minerals, diets and injections.

Then my mother broached the topic of a wig.