It's follicular fallout time!

This past week has been frantic. Happily I've had very little reaction to my first chemo session and have been working flat out, galvanized into action by my Canadian buddy Leslie. In an email to her I mentioned that I should really get cracking on writing up my next book because it's due to be published in the Spring.

"Damned right you'd better get cracking," she replied, "the book's already available on pre-order from Amazon."

Yikes! I checked it up and sure enough, there it was (it's called "Wedding Speeches For Women" and it's on www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.ca, but not amazon.com yet.)

There's nothing like the finality of an Amazon entry to get writers like me motivated so it has been tap, tap, tap on the keyboard for many hours, which chemo permitting will continue until the manuscript is finished.

I've been so busy I scarcely noticed on Wednesday this week that my hair has started falling out. What with dog hairs and cat hairs everywhere (we have two dogs and three cats) a few more don't really make much difference, but now I'm beginning to wonder whether I should preserve my fallout and have it spun into wool with which I could then knit a hat. What do you think?

Anyway I've already bought a great wig which I'm looking forward to wearing, and my son insisted that I may only wear beanie hats with designer labels. So I may become a "slaphead" but at least I'll be a smartly dressed one!

....and talking of being smartly dressed, it seems that's not a quality well known within surgical circles, according to this anonymous contribution from a surgeon in the USA...

During my surgical residency I was called out of a sound sleep to the emergency room. Unshaven and with tousled hair, I showed up with an equally unpresentable medical student.
In the ER we encountered the on-call medical resident and his student, both neatly attired in clean white lab coats.

The resident said to his student, "You can always tell the surgeons by their absolute disregard for appearance."

Two evenings later, I was at a banquet when called to the ER for yet another emergency.

I was stitching away - wearing a tuxedo - when I encountered that same medical resident. He looked at me, then said to his student, "Sure is sensitive to criticism, isn't he?"

Have a great weekend and if you're in the USA, have a wonderful Thanksgiving too.