Cut Hair, Shave Head, Die?

My hair is continuing to fall out with the FOLFOX treatments, but I haven't taken the next steps yet. The general advice is that I should cut it short first -- both to make it look thicker and to ease the psychological mayhem of seeing all these long strands of hair everywhere -- then see if it keeps falling out, and shave it if it does.

Mentally this sounds like a perfectly good plan. I still haven't taken that first step. Part of it is that the last time I had short hair was.... uh.... first grade. Chopping it off is a big step. But most of it is that I keep running into artistic projects or blogs or forums where you see the progression of someone's cancer go from full head of hair to chemo-haircut to bald head to... hearing about how they had a recurrence and went on to die.

I know it's crazy to think that way. Nothing I do cosmetically will change the fact that I have good survival odds.  If I think of head-shaving as a temporary thing, it's fine. I have friends who went through chemo, wore wigs, and now have beautiful heads of hair once more. But it's hard to shake that fear that this will be the first step toward never looking like myself again, that at the end of chemo we will see a recurrence before my hair grows back, and then the children will never see me looking like a "healthy" mom. And yet, when one kind friend suggested this pre-hair-chop period was the time I should be making them videos and pictures with us together and me looking "normal," just in case... ugh. No way could I make it through a video thinking that I was making a just-maybe-posthumous gift for little ones who would long since have forgotten what I looked like. Holy swear words.

So for now, I'm waiting to see if round 5 causes as much hair loss as 2, 3, and 4 did. I think I have another round or two of this before it gets to the point where strangers would think I looked weird. If I've got that time I'm going to take it.