If you’d asked me anything about beauty products before I’d gotten acute myeloid leukemia (AML), I would’ve struggled to find anything to say about the matter. However, after getting AML and then relapsing after a year, I went through two separate treatments — one involving chemotherapy and another involving chemotherapy and radiation — that thinned my hair and aged my skin past the spectrum of an average person in their late 20’s or early 30’s. On top of that, I suffer from THE autoimmune condition chronic graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD) that resulted from the bone marrow transplant that I got from my sister which is basically the medical way of saying that the immune system that I got from her bone marrow is attacking my body. The disease can affect different and or many parts of the body and in my case it affects my skin. The symptoms manifest as ulcers on my feet, ankles and legs which are basically open wounds that seep bodily fluids that have a slight odor which smell like something along the lines of a salt and metal at first. If the dressings are left unchanged then the odor eventually becomes unpleasant.
Given that I grew up in a middle class neighborhood of Staten Island in the 90’s, it was a good day if people with poor hand-eye coordination and first generation immigrant upbringings didn’t get called out for their shortcomings. The progressive wave of that decade was still taking place in real time. Gay marriage hadn’t been legalized in California and southern states were still electing politicians with openly racist platforms. It was a different time, but nonetheless, there were very few incentives for me to learn about beauty care and home goods, nor was my mother very keen on such things since we could neither afford them and information was harder to come by (remember magazines?). That being said, I think I’ve made a good case that I was starting from scratch as I began to explore solutions for all the little problems associated with illness.
I wanted to start with the odor from the ulcers. This was the most obvious problem and it didn’t have to do anything to take top priority. The problem presented itself wherever I went so I needed to find a solution for my personal space and my surrounding space. Neutralizing the odor was difficult if not impossible without specialized medical products that control bacteria and soak the fluid, so I got silver cream prescribed by my dermatologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering and signed up to a wound care supply subscription paid for by my insurance.
That being said, I still decided to look into fragrances for myself and my home. I read some information about men’s fragrances and found out that most of the stuff being sold at big department stores like Nordstrom are what’s categorized as “eau de toilette” which literally translates to cologne, but is also used to categorize fragrances that have a concentration of “essences” that’s between 8–10% which lasts about 2–4 hours. “Eau de parfum” on the other hand has a concentration of 10–15% and lasts more than 6 hours, so I looked at fragrances that were labeled as parfum on the site www.luckyscent.com and found a couple that I thought matched my personality and weren’t too expensive. You can choose fragrances that are seasonally appropriate or have specific scents that you like using sites like www.fragrantica.com which has a huge database of different scents and user reviews and breaks down fragrances by their individual components.
For the home, I noticed my wounds would develop odor while I was writing so I wanted something that could mask the odor in the rooms that I stayed in. I never liked going into candle stores, but I did enjoy some candles being used by shops or restaurants that I went to. I bought some Voluspa candles on www.candledelirium.com and found that they were affordable alternatives to the rich people candles (Tom Ford, Jo Malone) while still having a thoughtful mixture of scented oils. (Candles are just wax and scented oil)
My next issue was that the chemotherapy and radiation treatments really thinned out my hair. I like to keep blog posts short and easy to read so I’ll split this post into two and write about hair and health products in the next post. There’s a lot of hair products that I don’t think are helpful because they might only work for certain people or are sold with the intention of deceiving the consumer and there are a lot of gadgets that make being a survivor much more convenient.
If you’re a young adult cancer patient or survivor, this post was written for you. You’re at a stage in your life where you want to be independent of your family. Your friends only have an anecdotal understanding of what you’re going or gone through. It’s a very unique position to be in and one that has very limited information surrounding it, but thanks to the Internet, not only is it easier to find niche information, but you can even live a fulfilling life regardless of a handicap or chronic illness. I thank you for reading and hope you’ll join me in the next post!
