*I am currently one year out from having surgery with Dr. Konior of Oakbrook Illinois. My laptop crashed so bear with me on this post as I will be pulling pics from my phone and adding them as we go.
Brief Background:
53 years old, very fine blonde hair. I had 2 strip surgeries back in the bad old days of hair transplantation in the 90's. These two failed procedures left me with a horrible moth eaten look on top, pitting, and two stacked strip scars in the back. I consider those two surgeries to be the worst two life decisions I've made.
My Pros and Cons going into the procedure:
Pros: Blonde hair which minimizes the scalp/skin contrast. Realistic expectations, I realized that I will never have a full head of hair/hairline. I just wanted to get back to a normal looking appearance where I didn't feel that people I would meet would have their gaze shift up to my hairline.
Cons: Badly depleted donor area, very fine textured hair.
My decision to choose Dr. Konior was literally years in the making, as I was determined not to make a bad decision again, and I am really grateful that this forum existed or I would never have found out about him. I had been following his career/cases for a number of years and was always impressed by the precision of his work, and his ownership of his practice/procedures. He is a boss without a doubt. Other surgeons I was considering were Dr. Ron Shapiro, Dr. Lorenzo, Dr. Hasson, and Dr. Feriduni. I realized that I had one of the best surgeons in the world in my backyard (I'm in Chicago) so the choice was made.
After consulting with Dr. Konior it was decided that FUE would be the safest and most practical way to attempt a repair. My scalp laxity was tight and the thought of doing another strip and the scar stretching was just too much of a risk. I'd like to thank Dr. Konior for being so gracious with his time and correspondence leading up to my procedure, he always answered my e-mails and phone calls right away and is clearly engaged and accessible to his patients.
The procedure was basically finished on the first day but I came back the next morning for some fine tuning and to have the beard hair grafts done. Dr. Konior wanted to get more beard hairs into my scars but I was just squirming around in the chair too much for some reason, so we stopped at 150. I might go back for more at a later date.
I was driven to and from the hotel, things went very smoothly. I arrived the night before the procedure was to be done and got shaved at the office and Dr. Konior drew in the hairline so we could hit the ground running the next day.
Pics to follow...