May your days be merry and bright . . . My head hits the pillow filled with the strains of Christmas music. In my dream, I’m standing in the shower. The songs of the season are piped in. Suddenly, I’m wrapped in a black sticky shroud. It’s my own hair, and it’s melted over my body. Such are the happy holiday dreams of this chemotherapy patient.

Every breast cancer patient comes to know that the most widely used chemotherapy drugs cause hair loss. What she also comes to know is that losing one’s hair usually follows the second treatment in the cycle. My second treatment is December 28, 2009. Wild horses will have to drag me back.

A friend told me that her mother, a licensed psychotherapist, practiced something called desensitization to lure her to the second chemo. In psychology, desensitization is used to lessen someone’s fear of a situation by exposing them to it either in reality or in their imagination. As my friend and her mother lived some distance apart, her mother “conditioned” her by telephone. She’d spend twenty minutes having her daughter visualize a beautiful garden. The next twenty minutes, she’d have her picture herself taking the chemotherapy. So it went, back and forth until she felt able to keep going.

As I have no psychotherapist in my hip pocket, I’ve chosen to visualize the Aegean Sea. My husband has promised me a trip to Greece when this is all over. I’m already planning it in my mind. The Aegean is a deep blue-green. I’m on a sailboat, in a new swimsuit, with a figure better than I had in my twenties. I’m a golden brown. And I’m sipping bubbly drinks while munching raspberries and brie. A white shroud, made of a light chiffon, shields me from the sun’s rays. Breast cancer is in the distant past, an evil cast out of my life forever.

. . . And may all your Christmases be white.