Category Archives: Day Zero

Last Thursday night, a brave friend and her kitchen scissors sawed off the vast majority of my hair:

It looks a bit like the tail end of some poor, dead animal, doesn’t it? For reference, most of that hair ranges from 8 to 11 inches long. It’s layered, so a few bits don’t qualify, but we cut it off in one go rather than worry about measuring each strand.

And I got a proper trim at the hairdresser’s the next day, much to my friend’s relief. So I am now sporting a much shorter haircut, and the hair was mailed off today to Eva & Co. Wigs, the company recommended by UBC’s Cuts for Cancer.

Eva & Co. Wigs makes and donates wigs to the Canadian Cancer Society, and accepts ponytails of at least 8 inches in length (including the shortest hair in a layered ponytail). For more information on donating to Eva & Co. Wigs, visit their website, or check out the Canadian Cancer Society for information on donating to other organisations throughout the country.

Their mailing address is:

Hair Donation Program
107-950 Broadway St W
Vancouver BC  V5Z 1K7 

(Yes, the address listed here is formatted a little differently to the one on their website because if there’s anything I learned in my various customer service/administrative jobs is how to address an envelope properly according to Canada Post regulations. I’ve become extremely anal pedantic since then, i.e. please note that there are no commas or full stops unless part of the address name, the postal code does appear on the same line as city and province, and that there are two spaces between the province and the postal code.)

(This was obviously a far too important aspect of my life at one time.)

Some random facts I’ve learned in the process of growing out and donating my hair:

• It takes between 8 to 12 ponytails to make a single wig. Each ponytail is worth between US$100-200.
• Hair donation programs have different requirements for their ponytails, so look carefully! Some accept dyed hair, while others don’t. Lengths also vary, though the bare minimum seems to be 8 inches.
• Long hair gets split ends easily. It took me more months than I expected to grow my hair out, because I had to get it trimmed every few months to get rid of those persnickety ends.
• It cost approximately CA$10 to mail my hair, including purchasing a sufficiently large envelope.
• Short hair is prickly to sleep on.

On a more personal note, this is one of those things I am particularly glad to cross off my Day Zero list, not just to say ‘I did it!’, but because quite a few people in my circles of caring have been diagnosed with cancer in the last two months alone. Donating my hair doesn’t change the lives of anyone I know, but I suppose it’s my gesture of changing something small for someone somewhere, in the face of otherwise helplessness.

The good news is, everyone I know is dealing with their diagnoses, and currently there’s nothing to do but wait and keep an eye on things.

Much love to my beautiful friends and relatives. Your courage and positivity are an inspiration to everyone around you.

I have to say, it’s a bit anti-climatic to spend years thinking about donating your organs and spending only two and a half minutes actually signing up to do so. A couple of clicks and filling in one online form available on the BC Transplant Society website later, I am, to all intents and purposes, an organ donor!

(Well, as soon as they send me my confirmation email and I verify myself on the registry, anyway.)

So for those of you who’d like to donate, but think you need lots of time to sit down and fill it all in correctly — you really don’t. Just three minutes, including time spent getting your CareCard ready.

Live Life. Pass It On. (From BC Transplant Society. Credit: Eva Markvoort and Cyrus McEarchern.)

I decided to donate my organs a few years ago, but put off signing up until I had a conversation with my parents about my intentions. Because, although it’s not legally required to get consent from your next of kin, I thought my family had the right to have this discussion. Would it potentially upset them? Given that my family is everything from agnostic to atheist to pragmatic believers, but not practitioners, in some, but not all, traditional Chinese beliefs, throw in a healthy amount of Buddhist philosophy, a diluted dose of Christianity, and a minuscule smidgeon of Jewish heritage that no one (except myself) actually seems to pay any attention to — I had absolutely no idea how they would react to this particular announcement.

They weren’t at all upset.

It turns out, when I visited them this time around and asked, that my mother is adamantly against my donating blood and totally cool with donating organs. Her philosophy is that one might make me dead and the other, I already am so it doesn’t matter. Which is not really the kind of catchy phrase that one gleans from either Blood Services or the Transplant Society’s campaigns; I think, perhaps, that she might be thinking of the increase in AIDS in China in the 1990s when there was a sharp increase in HIV-positive cases due to infection through blood donation (or blood selling, as it really was at that time). Or perhaps she’s remembering the number of times I’ve suffered from low blood sugar in the last several years and how she doesn’t want me fainting on her hands again. Either way, we didn’t bother talking much about donating blood since I’m not eligible to do that anyhow.

Speaking of blood donations, did you know that if you can’t donate blood for transfusions, you might be able to donate to research instead? That’s for all you travellers who’ve been to malaria-infested places and the like. How exciting! (Can we tell that I want to donate blood, too? Maybe in another several years.)