Without a doubt, many today have never heard of Burma-Shave, but ask men and women who lived between 1925 and 1966 about it, and you just may coax out a memory or two.

Back then, Burma-Shave, maker of a brand of brushless shaving cream, advertised its product by posting rhymes on signs at intervals along the nation’s highways and byways. The typical arrangement called for six signs, each of the first five containing a line of verse, the sixth giving the brand name.

One of them in particular has been on my mind lately:

“In this vale/of toil and sin/ your head grows bald/ but not your chin/Burma-Shave.”

Clever and amusing. But with all due respect, I disagree.

See, in the past two months, I have noticed the hair on my head growing perilously thin, and fewer whiskers on my face. Although I anticipated that it could happen to my hair — as it did on my mother’s head when she was in chemotherapy — I never expected those once-stalwart whiskers to wimp out.

It came to my attention one morning as I took in the day’s first impression of self in the mirror, that formerly bewhiskered areas of my face were now bare.

I have mixed feelings about it. Gets kind of old drawing a razor across the old face every day. Still, it was unexpected.

A local band popular in the 1980s, Uncle Bonsai, sang a song to the balding and bereaved that included the following lyrics: “Remember, you’re not losing hair, you’re gaining face!”

Was that meant to console someone who is on the road to going full Uncle Fester? Well, it doesn’t.

Anyway, that is just one of the changes cancer-killing chemotherapy has wrought on my body in the interest of living a bit longer.

I learned how serious the situation was after episodes of debilitating dizziness caused me to black out and tumble down the stairs at home several times. The lesson was that chemo leeches from the body so many vital nutrients and such that I realized if I didn’t want to die, I’d better laser-focus on replenishing them.

Seems that keeping the blood pressure up is central to maintaining an upright position and staying conscious, which are, you know, sort of important.

That means — and no excuses — guzzling down eight liters of electrolyte-infused water every day.

It means no more sporadic eating.

It means shoving into my face a shocking array of brightly colored pills and capsules. To quote what the supposedly-dying character Burt Reynolds played said at one point in the 1978 film “The End” about the technicolor spread of pills in front of him:

“Looks like Walt Disney threw up.”

There is, however, a surprising element to all of this unpleasantness.

That is, the disease and its treatment have forced me to discipline myself in areas where I had been lax my entire life.

And in that sense I have found the diamond in this manure pile.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.