Ad copy

There's a version of me that shows up about three weeks after every round. Rested. Fast on my feet. She never stays long. For about three weeks, everyone gets that version. My husband gets her. My clients get her. Even I forget, a little, what the other version feels like. It's easy to, when she's the one showing up to work every day and doing the job well. Then she starts packing up to leave, the same way she always does, and there's nothing I can do to make her stay a day longer than she's going to stay. I do hair. My feet know the first sign before anything else does. There's a particular ache by three in the afternoon that isn't the regular kind of tired from standing since seven that morning. A different, heavier kind. I've learned to recognize it about two weeks before I'd ever think to blame my iron for it. One of my regulars told me last month that I looked great lately, really rested, and asked what I was doing differently. I said something about sleeping better. I didn't mention that I was three weeks out from a round, which is the only real answer, and not one I hand out at the shampoo bowl. It's strange, doing what I do for a living through this part. I spend my whole day telling other women their color looks great, their cut is growing out perfectly, they look rested. Meanwhile I'm doing the same kind of reading on myself in the mirror behind their heads, except I already know what I'll find. This happened again last week. I was sweeping up after my last client, closing alone, and I caught myself standing still for a second longer than I needed to, just to see if my legs wanted to keep going. They didn't, not really. I know this feeling. It means the good stretch is ending, and the countdown to the next round has already started, whether I scheduled it or not. The lights were half off, the way I leave them once the last client's gone. My own chair sat empty in the mirror across the room, the one nobody but me ever sits in during the day. I leaned the broom against the shampoo bowl and just stood there for a minute, in that particular quiet a salon gets after seven at night. I caught my own reflection in that big mirror while I was locking up, and looked at myself for longer than I normally do. Same face. Same person who did six color services today without anyone noticing a thing was off. You'd never know from looking. That's sort of the whole problem with this stretch. Nothing shows. Not on my face, not on a test, not for weeks yet. Just a feeling in my legs by three o'clock that I've learned not to argue with anymore. My doctor and I have a plan for the round itself. We don't have a plan for this part, the slow fade in the weeks before I'd ever show anything on paper. By the time a test would catch it, I've usually already felt it coming for a month. She believes me when I tell her that. Not every doctor would, and I don't take it for granted. We've been at this long enough that she doesn't need me to describe the whole feeling anymore. I just tell her it's starting, and she knows exactly what I mean, months before any test would confirm it. That took years to build, and I don't take that for granted either. I've got my own version of the insurance fight, same as anyone on this schedule does. That's not what this one's about, though. I've seen the comments under posts like this one. Scam. Snake oil. Somebody's trying to sell you something. I've said versions of that myself, about other things, so I understand where it comes from. I've clicked on plenty of promises for an easy fix to something that took me years to even get properly diagnosed. Most of it was nothing. Some of it made me feel worse for trying. Keep your arms crossed. That's fair. All I've got is what's true for me right now, and you can do whatever you want with that. Here's the part I don't say out loud much. I've stopped letting myself hope the stretch will hold longer this time, because getting my hopes up and then watching them fall again wears on me in a way plain tired never does, and I've done that math too many times already. Some weeks it's easier to just brace for the slide than to hope it skips me this once. Bracing doesn't disappoint you. Hope does, sometimes. There's a specific flavor of dread that comes with watching a good stretch start to end. It's not the tired part that gets me anymore. I've made peace with tired. It's the part where I have to decide, again, whether to say anything to my husband, or just wait for him to notice on his own. Usually I wait. He always notices anyway, a few days behind me, which somehow makes it worse and better at the same time. I caught myself doing it again last month, actually counting weeks on my fingers at the shampoo bowl, working out how long it had been since my last round, like knowing the number would change anything about what's coming. It won't. It never has before. Quick thing. If you are in the part of this where your numbers are genuinely dangerous right now, or you are waiting on a round you cannot put off, none of this is the piece you need today. That is between you and your doctor, and it should stay there. Do what she says first, before you read one more word of this. Close this out, make the call, and come back to it later if you still want to. The thing I actually sat down to write about is the part in between. Not the round. Not the recovery right after it, either, when everyone's asking if you've been on vacation. Everything else out there covers the diagnosis, or the round itself, or that good stretch after. Nobody covers this part. The slow slide nobody schedules an appointment for. The part where it's just me, noticing. I've quit oral iron in this exact stretch before, more than once. Different bottles, same ending. My stomach would turn on me by the second week, and I always chose the slide over feeling sick on top of it. So I'd stop. Then the next slide would come around and I'd have nothing in the cabinet again. There was a prescription-strength one my doctor tried me on once, actually, back before we settled into the round schedule. Strong enough that it should have worked, on paper. I lasted maybe two weeks before the nausea won. I remember telling her it felt like it was fighting me instead of helping me, which is a strange thing to say about a vitamin, but that's genuinely what it felt like. There was another one before that, the over-the-counter kind everyone recommends first. The instructions took up half the box. Empty stomach, but not right before bed. With vitamin C, but not with coffee or tea for two hours either direction. I read it three times standing in the aisle, trying to figure out when in a twelve-hour workday any of that was supposed to happen. I do color and cut for a living. I don't get to plan my mornings around a supplement's mood. This time is different in exactly one way, and only one. There's a strip I've kept taking through this entire slide, the first thing in years I haven't quit by week two. It's small, it tastes like raspberry, and it's gone before I've finished sectioning a client's hair for a color. No stomach fight. No dread before I take it. Just something that happens at my station most mornings, same as putting my apron on. I keep waiting for the catch. Some stomach thing that shows up in week three. Some reason I stop without meaning to, the way I have every other time before. It hasn't come yet. My doctor knows. I mentioned it the same visit I mentioned everything else. My next draw is booked for a few weeks out, same as it would be regardless. I am not going to tell you it stopped the slide, because I genuinely do not know that yet, and I've learned not to promise strangers things I cannot back up. What I know is it is not my infusion, it was never supposed to be, and anybody implying a strip replaces a round is not somebody I would trust either. I just didn't quit this one. That's the whole update. The woman at the infusion center's front desk always says the same thing on my way out. See you next round. Never anything more than that. She's been at that desk longer than I've been going there, which is saying something at this point. She knows my name without looking it up. She knows which arm I prefer. She's never once asked me how I'm really doing, and I think that's a kindness, not an oversight. I used to think it was just a thing she says, that see-you-next-round line. Now I think she knows exactly how much more there'd be to say, and she's choosing not to make me carry it to the parking lot. I keep a cardigan on the passenger seat for infusion days, since that room runs cold no matter the season. It's been sitting there since my last round, half forgotten, the way it always is until I need it again. I noticed it there again last week, while I was doing the math about how many weeks I've got left in this stretch, and thought, here we go again. I am not promising you the next stretch holds longer, because I do not make promises like that anymore, not to myself and not to anyone reading this. All I can tell you is I tried the one thing that didn't ask me to quit it, and I'm curious enough to keep going until my next labs tell me something real. I would not call it hope, exactly. Just not giving up on finding out. I've been wrong about my own body before. I've felt a stretch start to slip and been wrong about the timing by weeks in either direction. So take everything I've said here as one woman's read on her own legs, nothing more official than that. Maybe this stretch holds a little longer. Maybe it does not, and I am back in the recliner on schedule, same as always. The piece this links to reads like the middle weeks feel. If your good stretch is ending right now, it will know you. Either way, I'll know something in a few weeks that I do not know today. Right now, that's enough to keep going on.