motow

Legend007, did you go through with it? If you went to Diep for FUT, I hope you had a better experience than I did. https://www.hairrestorationnetwork.com/topic/48198-is-this-normal-fut-donor-area-1-day-after-suture-removal/ Scar is so wide I could get his name tattooed in there.

The pink area is not shock loss. It's an indented gap where the seem stretched open. I wouldn't want other people to get confused about what shock loss looks like. The hair below the scar has become quite thin. That's shock loss.

Well, this continued to stretch. Over the course of 4 days it went from 1mm to 4mm. Last night I applied a steri-strip in an attempt to keep it from spreading open farther. I wish I had known about these things on the second day! The strip compressed the scar a bit. At this point I'm not sure that it will help it to heal smaller, but I intend to leave it there for a few weeks with my fingers crossed. I finally met with my doctor today (after emailing twice). He said the only way to fix it is to either remove it now and risk infection and possibly a larger scar, or wait to have it reworked (cut out and stitched back up). He said that I must be a slow healer and that 9 days wasn't long enough in stitches for me. Though, I think it's possible that donor strip size and wound tension also played a role.

I know that the scar is going to change as it heals. My biggest concern was how quickly it widened after the sutures were removed. I'm trying to figure out how common this is, and if having it stretch early is any sign that it will be more susceptible to stretching during the later phases. On the far end of the scale I was worried about dehiscence, as this was only over the course of 1 day. But, it appears about the same today. Posting another photo just to document it here in case it ends up helpful to anyone else. Thanks for your comments, guys! And thanks for the updated photo Slush! Looks pretty good to me. More like what I was expecting for myself, or hoping for at least. It looks like I'm only 5 days behind you (Feb: 27), but they removed my stitches on day 9. I haven't gone past finding decent loose fitting hat to wear when I have to go back to work on Monday. But, given my shock loss, I'll likely be on that thread soon. Thanks again!

Thanks for the photos Slush! It looks like your line was tighter than mine to begin with. No idea how you've been able to avoid checking out your scar every day. Do you know if you had a trichophytic closure? I emailed my photos to my doctor and got a response from one of his assistants. She said that she had shown the photos to the doctor, and not to worry, that everything looked normal. But, my gut is telling me otherwise, so I'm looking for more opinions/experiences. Thanks again!

I'm hoping that some of you can share, based on your own experiences or other known cases, if this donor area looks normal after less than a day of having the stitches removed. Does this ever have the potential to become more narrow again though the healing process? The first image is just a few hours after having the sutures removed. The second image was taken about 13 hours after that. To me it looks like it's spreading quickly and I still feel a fair bit of tension in my scalp. Thanks! I really appreciate any feedback. I'm flipping out a little.