‘Today’ show’s Jill Martin cries trying on wigs after chemo hair loss: Cancer will ‘take your soul’
“Today” show contributor Jill Martin is continuing to be candid about her breast cancer journey.
After losing her hair during chemotherapy treatment, Martin, 47, shared emotional videos on Instagram on Dec. 27 about going wig shopping.
“It’s really hard and strange,” she said in one Instagram story. “But I’ll make believe I’m playing dress-up,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be a brunette.”
In another Instagram story, she tries on a blond wig.
“This looks just like me, right?” she asks, looking emotional. “It’s hard. But … I feel like I could style it. It’s fun. It’s like playing dress-up. I’m dressing up as myself.”
In another Instagram story, she reveals that she lost her eyebrows and eyelashes about three weeks after chemotherapy. “I’m going to get eyelashes now,” she said. “Sort of like an ambush makeover on myself.”
Martin is documenting her journey for “Today.” In an emotional Wednesday video, she can be heard telling her doctor that she feels like a “shell” of herself and at times sleeps all day.
“Cancer will take whatever you let it. It will take your soul, it will take your hair. And that may seem small to you, but it’s not. Cancer wants everything,” she tells the camera.
“When I walk into the studio I feel loved, I feel safe. It feels like home to me … Everybody knows what I’m going through. And everyone’s amazing. You think I’m going to let cancer take away something else I love to do?” she went on. “I think people are like, ‘Oh! Your surgery is done. You’re good.’ I leave the show and I’m back in reality and fighting for my life.”
Martin revealed her stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis in July. She received the diagnosis just one year after getting married to businessman Erik Brooks.
After testing positive for the BRCA gene, she decided to undergo a double mastectomy, just as Angelina Jolie did.
But, a preoperative MRI revealed she already had developed cancer.
“I am in shock, but at the same time I’m so grateful because it could be a very different story that we’re talking about,” Martin told People magazine in an interview at the time.
“Of course I’m devastated. You hear the C-word and you think the worst. But after you hear the word and you absorb it, you then have to be your own best friend.”
Jill Martin/Instagram
In August, she said that her double mastectomy had been successful. However, she further explained in a “Today” essay that while her oncologist told her there is a “good chance” she is cancer-free, she will need further treatment to “help ensure that.”
“I will also need to take anti-hormonal drugs for 5 years. And I will most likely need chemotherapy because of the aggressiveness of the tumor,” she wrote.
“That is the part that hit me the hardest — the idea of chemo.”
In October, she posted a selfie of herself crying in the hospital while getting treatment. “And sometimes it is just okay to cry. Just as long as you continue to fight,” she wrote on top of the Instagram story.
On Thanksgiving she told Today.com, “I’m grateful that my body has allowed me to get through this. Cancer wants to take whatever you have — it wants to take your friendships, it wants to take your job, it wants to take your health, it wants to take your hair, it wants to take your family … it wants to take everything. And so you just have to sort of fight where you can, and keep what’s important to you.”
