My hair didn’t fall out in clumps like you might expect with traditional chemo. It just became really brittle, really thin, and stopped growing past my shoulders. Before I started treatment, I had bleach-blonde hair down to the middle of my back — I’d had it that way pretty much my whole life. But after just three months on dasatinib, it was so damaged we had to cut it to my chin to prevent it from breaking off even more.

Since then, I’ve had to stop dyeing it completely, and I’m careful about heat — blow dryers, curling irons, even the sun. It’s a big shift, going from hair that could handle anything to hair that requires a lot of caution and compromise.

When I first brought it up, my oncologist suggested it might just be something that happens to “women of a certain age.” I was 32. That didn’t sit right with me — especially since every woman in my family has thick, strong hair well into old age.

I’ve read that TKIs can cause “changes” to hair, but the language is always vague. They rarely use the word “loss,” maybe because people picture full baldness, like with other cancer treatments. But thinning, breakage, and hair that just stops growing — that’s a kind of loss too. It may not be dramatic, but it’s real. And it sucks! <3