It's been 11 years, Sue Greim Glader remembers, since "my life took a very hard left turn."
Glader, '88, was a new mother, still nursing her 13-month-old son, Hans, when she felt a pea-sized lump under her arm. The next year was a succession of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
Hans was mostly unfazed as his mother's chemo caused her to lose her hair. "The blessing of it was he was so young that he didn't really get it," Glader says. "I would say, 'Where is mommy's hair? And he would rub my head and giggle." But Glader was keenly aware of the stares and questions of children who saw her bald head when she went about her life in Marin County.
Glader wondered what children's books said about moms who lose their hair and was discouraged to find dreary, even frightening, accounts. "I didn't look fantastic [after chemo]," she says, but she felt the portrayals were unnecessarily grim. She dreamed of a different presentation: brighter and maybe even a bit whimsical. "If you present something in a certain light, kids are going to run with it."
She wrote something when she finished her treatment. But then, eager to get back to normalcy, she set it aside and immersed herself in mothering.
As Hans approached the end of elementary school, Glader picked up the project again. She hired Dutch illustrator Edith Buenen and self-published Nowhere Hair, a picture book that reassures kids who are faced with their mother's cancer.
Glader has focused on selling the book to cancer centers and online. Her surgeon, Laura Esserman, the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UCSF, is among the books' fans. "This book . . . has just the right tone and provides comfort and solace to the young and the not-so-young," Esserman says.
