Seesaw

Fantastic result man! Your hair is so versatile and however you style it, it looks great and natural. I'm following your journey with interest and good luck in your next procedure to get that crown filled. You’re starting from a tremendous place and there isn’t much left to get back to a full head of hair. Stay the course! 

On 9/14/2020 at 3:16 AM, JohnAC71 said:

Excellent result! Interesting read too. Thanks 🙏 

Thanks for reading! 

On 9/14/2020 at 2:31 AM, Fahri said:

Thank you for sharing your journey with us, its much appreciated. Your transformation is inspiring, you must be over the moon!

My pleasure! Thanks for reading. I am certainly happy with the result. 

On 9/9/2020 at 4:43 PM, Melvin-Moderator said:

Looks fantastic, donor looks really good short too 👏🏼

Thanks Melvin! Yes I was happy that the donor looked decent short. Another kudos to HDC. 

On 9/11/2020 at 2:38 AM, Steeeve said:

@Seesaw Your continued results are remarkable and Completely unremarkable. These are both compliments! It’s remarkable to us forum members following along with your journey. From your starting point to where you are now...? Bro, it’s amazing. It has completely reframed your face.

When I say it’s completely unremarkable that’s because anybody you meet for the first time from here on out is never going to look at you and say, “that guy has had a hair transplant.” No, you will look totally unremarkable to them. You’re just going to be a guy with an awesome, totally natural looking, full head of hair.

Your donor looks really good short. I believe your crown will show more signs of progress until 12 to 18 months, as well.

Man, I’m seriously impressed with this result. Congratulations!

Steeeve, thank you very much. This is the best comment I have received on my thread and I appreciate your words and compliments. 

You picked up on something that my family members have frequently said, that my hair looks very natural, and almost exactly how I looked like 10-15 years ago. The “unremarkability” and how natural the result came out, was the biggest success factor in their eyes. You made me appreciate that even more with your comment.

I am definitely giving the crown a few more months before passing final judgment. Best wishes to you on your hair restoration journey! 

Hello fellas following my thread, here are some photos from mid-August, at 8 months post-op. At that time, I tried - unsuccessfully I might add - to give myself a fade haircut at home. There is some small improvement from the last update. I don’t know if density is going to improve much further but I’m satisfied so far. 

I’m also strongly considering taking finasteride based on the recommendation by Asterix0 and Melvin, and I’ll be talking to my general physician for a prescription when I see him later this month. 

6 hours ago, asterix0 said:

Just wanted to say results look really good man! Are you on finasteride to protect the hairs? 

This result is making me strongly consider Dr.Maras

Thanks man!

 I’m not on Finasteride. I figured since the hair in my front third and vertex was basically gone before surgery, there is not much native left to protect, so I didn’t think that it would help me much. Based on my limited reading about it, it would not help much with hair from the donor zone, as that hair isn’t as sensitive to DHT as natives. HDC didn’t particularly say that they recommend it but they did caution that in 15-20 years I could be looking at further long term hair loss. Would you recommend I consider it? 

9 hours ago, BjornBorg said:

Looking good bro!

Thank you Bjorn Borg 🎾! By the way, he (you?) still has a great head of hair at 64 years old. 

21 hours ago, Curious25 said:

Wow it’s night and day compared to from where you first started! Crown looks to still have quite a few hairs that need to thicken and mature which should provide you with a marked cosmetic improvement over the next 6 months, and even then, you’l have enough reserves to stick in a couple hundred extra multis if you wanted! Very impressed with your hairline and frontal 3rd! 

Thanks man, it sure is a big difference from 2-3 years ago. I look at my old photos and the big improvement keeps me grounded and sensible, and not too picky about the density in every little  area of my scalp. I hope that the thickening helps cover the crown sufficiently that I don’t need any further transplants, but like you said, there is enough reserves for further touch up. The clinic said that I have another 2000 grafts left for a third surgery, and my plan for now is to save them for further hair loss in the side humps. 

8 hours ago, JohnAC71 said:

Looking good for 6 months out. How many grafts went in to the crown area.? 

Thanks man. 1380 grafts went into the crown area. 

It’s been 6 months since my second hair transplant and I’m continuing to see improvements. The frontal half is filling in nicely but the crown area is still visibly bald. My hair looks best in indoor environments without harsh lighting, which is what I understand to be the norm with hair transplants. I tried to capture some photos in both soft and harsh lighting. 
The donor area is recovering well and is showing less signs of the over-harvesting that I was concerned about in my last update. 
 

In one of the photos below, I circled in red the areas where I would like to see improvement. 
 

On 5/25/2020 at 6:11 AM, SOW said:

Hi,

Any update ?

Hi SOW,

I’m posting my 6-month post op update shortly. 

15 hours ago, HTHope said:

Do you have pics of your donor after like 5-7 days?

I don’t. I didn’t take any for the first week after surgery, because I never figured they’d be useful. There were some scabs and crusts left at 5 days. I recall that at 7 days, I was overall in good enough shape to leave the house and visit friends, and only a little redness was left. 

22 minutes ago, HTHope said:

yeah it looks like you have plenty more in the back. I too have an area on the side that looks overharvested in the upper and lower regions. I think its a little more common than we think. Most people probably wont notice it tho. It sucks tho because I used to be able to fade it down to a #1 and now i'm not even sure if i can do a 2.

Yeah not being able to fade it down is exactly why the overharvest is bugging me. Fades are all the rage these days. 
 

1 hour ago, HTHope said:

No I was just complimenting your hair characteristics bro.

 

That's a lot of grafts in the bank. Did you mention the small area that you noted as overharvested? What was their response?

Oh thanks man. I should have just gone with thank you haha. 

The core of my donor zone in the back is still  healthy (added a photo), and I think that in their effort to preserve that as much as possible, and spread the extraction around the entire donor, they might have extracted too much from the sides. I have not brought the small overharvested area to them yet. I wanted to see first if some folks here would agree that it was over harvested. I would appreciate your opinion on this one. 

21 hours ago, HTHope said:

Your hair characteristics are very good. Did they tell you how many grafts you have available?

Dr. Maras said because my hair isn’t straight, he needed 6000 grafts to cover my baldness. If my hair was straight, we would have needed a lot more. Is that what you meant? 
 

Yes, unbelievably to me, I was told still have another 2000-2500 grafts for a third surgery if hair loss keeps progressing rapidly, in addition to about 1000 beard grafts. It seems to me that I need a third surgery for density, but I’m not sure I will do that. 

8 hours ago, BjornBorg said:

Thanks for updating and please continue to do so.

Will do. Thanks for following. 

36 minutes ago, SOW said:

Thanks for sharing, I'm sure your hair will fill in the donor. 

 My question was how many grafts were implanted as a repair? 

 

Gotcha... about 800 grafts were added to the area of the first surgery. 

15 hours ago, SOW said:

Hi,

Any update?

How many Grafts  were implanted in the area of the first surgery ?   

Hi SOW,

I posted an update above. The first surgery was 3130 grafts and the second was 2862. Combined, I had just under 6000 grafts total. 
 

Thanks for following my progress!

Photos below are from January, February and March 2020.

Hello everyone,

It’s been a little over 4 months since my second surgery and I figured I’d provide an update. Things have progressed well over the last few months. Recovery went as well as I could ask for. 2 weeks after surgery I started playing some tennis and ramped up to my normal activity level by week 4. I started seeing some growth and infill in the transplanted area around a month ago, at 3.5 months post op. At this point, when I leave my house I don’t even bother with hair fibers. From a distance, in photos, and on video calls, hair looks fine but when standing below a light bulb or taking a close-up photo, you can still see plenty of weakness. The area right behind my hairline on the right side, which was touched up in the second surgery, is the weakest now in the frontal third (I pointed to it in one of the photos below). However, my biggest gripe though is that I have an overharvested area above my right ear. It was borderline overharvested after the first surgery, and the doctor still punched a large number from that area. I also included a photo of the donor zone on my right side. 
 

Photos below are from April 2020

7 hours ago, karatekid said:

Very nice results! Im considering Dr Maras myself. those results encourage me

Yeah Dr Maras does good work. I also appreciated that he is also very approachable and his bedside manners are top notch. He speaks English fluently and I liked that I could communicate with him directly. I saw Dr Maras multiple times a day during surgery. Even when he’s not the one doing the work, he would occasionally pop by, and he would check on me right before leaving the clinic. I read stories on this form about people who paid handsomely for their surgery and barely saw the surgeon after they drew the hairline. That was not my experience at HDC. 

And here are photos taken today, 9 days post surgery 

5 hours ago, SOW said:

The files are invalid
 

Not sure what happened. 

Here are photos taken immediately after surgery. 

On 12/18/2019 at 1:42 PM, SOW said:

I will follow your progress please post pictures from time to time.

I'm sure you'll have a good result

Sure. 
 

Here are photos taken immediately after the second day of surgery last week. 

On the first day, 1384 grafts were placed into the crown area. On the second day, 1478 grafts were used to finish filling the crown, and improve density in the mid-scalp, and repair the right side of my hairline, which I’ve pointed to being noticeably higher and less dense in this thread (Dr Maras agreed that it needs some touch-up).