Cancer-stricken Brown posts touching video, hopes it will help others as well

Oct 19, 2012 09:17 GMT  ·  By
Diem Brown documents hair loss after chemo to help other women battling cancer
   Diem Brown documents hair loss after chemo to help other women battling cancer

Diem Brown, star of MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer for the second time. Thinking her experience could help other young women going through the same, she’s made the video below.

In her blog on People magazine, Brown notes that, the moment she heard she had cancer, she went online and searched on Google.

She did not want to know about her life expectancy or anything of the kind, because she’d set off with optimism, thinking that she would beat cancer and live to tell the story.

What Diem was trying to find out online was how chemo affected the hair: when she would start losing it, how fast it would happen, which were her alternatives.

Because she found no satisfactory answer to her questions (she says she didn’t want to shave her head), Diem set out to do a little experiment on her own, which you will also find embedded below, at the end of the article.

With it, she hopes, she will help others in a similar situation in the sense that, by seeing it, they will know what to expect after chemo, as far as hair loss is concerned.

“At my two-and-a-half week mark after my carbo/taxol chemo infusion treatment, I started recording my bi-nightly brushing of my hair ritual in order to show others what really goes on behind closed doors,” Diem writes on her People blog.

“It's a funny roller coaster, and at the end of the video something happened that really shocked me. I wasn't prepared for it, but my inner Melissa Etheridge spirit kicked in, and I feel proud of how I handled it,” she goes on to say.

“I hope this video helps in understanding and also helps give you a fascination fix on what goes on behind closed doors. It's raw, real, no makeup or care at all about what I look like. I just wanted to make my Google search contribution, so that future patients Googling hair loss during chemo can see exactly what happens when you don't shave it off,” Diem adds.

Useless to say, reaction to the video has been amazing: Brown wanted to help other young women in the same situation, and this is exactly what she did.