Jonulous

Started recently doing it fortnightly with a Dr Pen M8 model, and the only needling serum product I could find that has growth factors harvested from donated human bone marrow (yes, really!). It's certainly more comfortable than when I use same device on the face.

Oh thanks Gatsby. Your own restoration thread is among the most epic I think.

I'm back for the three month check in. Hair is doing what hair likes to do. And I'll now put a more firm tick against the 'new growth' option. Seems pretty clear that there's a bit of that at this point, at least along the hairline where it's easier to compare. Hope that my attempt to emulate last month's set of pics is useful to the casual person browsing this. Haven't mentioned so far in the thread that I'd located a compounding pharmacy in my country who partner with tele-health doctors for prescriptions of hair and skin related medicines. The consultation process was almost ridiculously easy. I'd first tried out a blended Finasteride & Minoxidil capsule with 1 mg of each. For my renewal I reverted back to taking separately while upping the Minoxidil dose to 2.5 per day. This is only since 20 July (I went off Minoxidil a week or two before surgery), so unlikely to be influencing much in my growth only these few weeks in. Pics in order of display: 1 Wet hair in indirect but bright light 2 Viewing the recipient from above at week 2, 2 months and 3 months 3. A front shot with dry hair 4-6. Day -1 before treatment, 2 months, and 3 months from three angles 7. Close up right corner 8. Close up left corner - I know the hair's colour seems way more gray-peppered than much of the photo set. It's just due to taking that one outside and more close-up with no flash I suppose. 9. Donor

Unless the Thailand prominence is sort of just on the coat tails of all the other cosmetic medical tourism that flows in that direction? Possibly the case. I did the Europe option. Perhaps one thing that drags it down for some is the value added taxes (VATs) that can be applied over and above the base price across the EU (unsure with the UK now it is its own realm). But there are actually carve-outs from having to shell out for that, as I or others can attest.

The new hairline really seems like it's starting to form up. Very nice for 60 days progress. I figured out the other day I must have been in there one day after yours. (And tend to agree about that hotel, haha).

Taking advantage of the weekend to do my 2 month progress - just a day early. I'd mentioned in my opening spiel that I count myself as fortunate to have gotten to the age I had with hair loss being more at irritation levels, than at 'Oh no, where's it all GONE!' type levels. And similarly with navigating month two - as the regular peak time for ugly duckling - I'm glad to have the luxury of some native hair both in and near the transplant zone to add a fair bit of camouflage as we await better things to come. Hopefully the pics I've chosen for this update are informative. Redness is brought out by the camera flash in some of these pics. But has otherwise gotten to a level and a sparseness where I don't usually notice it. I did get two rounds under the Heallite LED lamp. Where I live they've been rolled out to chain type laser/cosmetic clinics, meaning during the frequent promo sales you can get a treatment for the price of a couple of movie tickets. I seemed to see a bit faster dissipation of the deepest pinks and reds in the days following the Heallite. Pics in order of display: 1 Wet hair in indirect but bright light 2 What remains the really unflattering angle - viewing the recipient from above (week 2 paired with at 2 months) 3. A front shot with dry hair 4-6. Pre treatment versus 2 months from three angles 7. Close up left corner 8. Close up right corner 9. Donor (hair was clipped to #2 back and sides about 3 weeks ago) I think the close up shots of the corners seem to be showing that good stuff is on the way, maybe the first murmurings of appreciable growth by this time next month.

Guessing you mean more the temporal corners, as your actual temple points look really strong as others have said. Maybe you could, but it seems to be an area that chews through a lot of grafts for every couple of millimeters you lower it.

If it helps in your evaluation, I recall my version of the above from May was like 100% of recipient incisions, and a clear majority of the donor punching done by Dr B. Division of labour possibly varies according to the total graft numbers involved. Both doctors are nice people to entrust your scalp to for a day.

A cold and wet day here prompted me to go searching. The yellow lasso loops are denoting any recently sprouting hairs. Now, are they a) early growth of transplanted follicles, or b) native hairs that have just woken up in the past week or so? Hard to tell, but I welcome them into Project: Jonulous's New Hairline either way.

Hey from my one-month-out perch 😃 Things of interest since the last post: Exactly two weeks after surgery a friendly man on reception during a hotel check in quizzed me about what I'd had done. He was thinking about getting HT also, and seemed to like the fact that I could just about get by without a head covering that soon after surgery. Well, obviously I wasn't so healed that he was oblivious to the signs of treatment, but he'd assumed it had been performed further in the past. I was back home and returning to work this past week. It was more the shortness of my hair that gained commentary at work than the stray patches of red. Granted I had been in sunny places, so the made up excuse of mild sunburn was available to me. Going purely by square centimeters, rather than by graft numbers, it's probably the case that 75% of my treatment was done behind what had been the natural hairline. So I guess that helps with having some decent amount of native hair to smother the reddened scalp. (note if you go by numbers of grafts then the area in front of the old hairline maybe overtakes, since all the 1s and 2s were probably concentrated there). The only thing I've actually frowned about in recent times is the somewhat tepid regrowth in my mid scalp, behind the zone that actually received the grafts. I sort of knew it was less strong than the surrounding hair, but the difference is really stark when you can see it so clearly in the weeks after being buzzed right down for the HT. More investment in that area in the future, I suspect.

A few images from Day 10, or near enough to 1.5 weeks out. Most crusts are gone, with just a few little specs left towards the back of the recipient. All seems to be going fine, and can't think of a lot else to post just at the moment. I guess the redness factor rates a mention. In natural light it doesn't look all that stark. A bit more so in warmer indoor lighting. Meanwhile I've been enjoying the scenic treats of Madeira, Portugal.

Here's a sample of the ones taken from all the key angles by the clinic team on my pre-surgery consultation and then right after HT. Hopefully I can match these positions when I try and continue taking After pics. Since I neglected to mention it in the last posts, worth saying that I was struck by the whole team at the clinic having a seamless flow to their work. That's the case whether it was bouncing around the one query I had about my hairline design among both Doctor Bisanga and the technicians to see if there was consensus on my suggested tweak, or the handover between recipient-site incisions and punching work by Dr Bisanga (and Dr Kostas for a time), then the pair of technicians who transferred the grafts between their old and new dwellings, and helped tally the graft count. Or even my break for lunch.

Morning of Day 5 post HT. I'm just using the phone's selfie lens for these, which I honestly don't place huge trust in to capture realism. But it's nice to have even a half decent record. I'll use the SLR camera on Day 7 (still no USB cable!), and hopefully the clinic series before surgery with the marked-up scalp to will arrive to share some time also. If today's photos are to be trusted, then I'd rate the donor area condition as actually pretty pleasing so far. It hasn't itched, though there's the occasional throb or series of tender areas. Scabs are downsizing a little in the transplant area. My only side effects that were really far into self-consciousness territory would be the slow journey of swelling as it moved from forehead, via eyes and cheekbones under gravity over days 2-4. I looked pretty repellent! Today I would walk around without sunglasses again, thankfully. And the mask guidance on public transport was also my friend.

This is me, popping my (retrofitted) head in on Day 2 post HT. All goes nicely with getting over the treatment. A few bulges as all the local anesthetic migrates down past the eyes and cheekbones, but at least not much to report by way of discomfort. I'm rather a long way from home and don't seem to have packed my main camera's cable for downloading images. So the thread will probably get more populated with my progress images some time in June. Phone pics are also an option and I'll include a couple in the mean time. For now I can at least set out the decision chain I followed towards this, and anything else I can think of to be informative. 2017 Then 47, I visited a hair surgeon in my home city of Sydney Australia, to sate my curiosity about both medication and surgical options. I got to watch the magnified probe image as it passed areas of higher density, moderate thinning and post-recession thinning. The main outcome of that consult was to get on a low dose of Finasteride, and have an understanding that I would have adequate donor characteristics if I wanted to explore surgery in the future. Late 2019 I'd been a pretty reasonable responder to medication, with the zone of robust hair seeming to re-colonise into some previously weaker areas up top. Quite a good place to be at 49, and I hope that none of this thread makes out like I don't appreciate having held to a relatively low NW stage all this way into adulthood. It's more a case of taking a look around sites like this one, and seeing how far the artistic and technical aspects of surgery had advanced these days. I got a bit inspired to see if those of my issues that were beyond medication's reach could be seamlessly treated. You'll see in the attached hairline shots with those crude attempts at brow-to-hairline measures that in certain light I could still pull off a fairly dense aesthetic. But I didn't love the shape of my post-recession hairline especially in the corners. And in the other shots with headphones on flattening down the hair, the weakness around the front becomes more apparent. I'd probably lost the ability to pull off a forward combed fringe some time during my 40s. I did the first consult in relation to the then new BHR Athens clinic. Then right as I looked at some dates for early 2020, my island home went into full island mode as part of the pandemic response. Then to now Kept in periodic contact with Ian from the BHR team, updating photos as we went to ensure that the graft estimates would be still in the ballpark. And at last made it over to BHR Brussels to have the treatment with the team there. I should add I don't think there was ever a question I had that Ian was unable to address, which is a helpful thing when you're trying to plan for doing something like this very remote from home. Final pic attachment from today to give an idea of how the grafts were allocated. Basically a bit of reconstruction to address the shape of the corners, and the rest to rebuild the weaker zones along the front, while tracking somewhat more closely to the existing hairline shape. The particulars: 2297, comprising 444 x singles 996 x 2 follicular unit 825 x 3 follicular unit 32 x 4 follicular unit

Really liking that design. A reset for the hairline above the temples is uppermost on my own wish list. So it's interesting to see a case where that is like the biggest aspect.

The caution with these as always is how much one type of redness/inflammation treatment is transferable to some other kind. With that as caveat, I've had areas not on the face, where I wanted to speed up the process of fading redness after I got some benign moles taken off. They used a vascular laser in that case, e.g. Cutera Excel V or Candela V Beam.

I can comment on the consultation process of the clinic, from around 4 years back. It was fine. (I should have put that behind a spoiler tag to up the anticipation levels haha). But yeah a pleasant enough consultation which in my case just led to getting on some finasteride at a lower than standard dose. Certainly didn't feel pushed in the direction of a surgical intervention. The following comment is more about the relative scarcity of hair surgeons with much of a profile in this region, rather than about any particular doctor.... It's possible to be left with the impression that the relatively small number of doctors who are active down here can make a decent living by dividing their working week doing 70% chargeable consultations to 30% actual hands-on surgical stuff. So that is more the basis of my reluctance to shop around locally for a surgeon.

Looks all rather impressive to my untrained eye. Don't want to sidetrack the discussion but since we're on the topic of pricing - are there any primer threads that cover on a country by country basis within the EU how hair surgery is treated for VAT purposes? e.g. I guess in this current case of Spain, it could be 21%,or maybe less if there's some carve-out.

I can't cite clinical validity on this, but there has been some buzz around the latest generation of LED healing/rejuvination devices like Healite II or Omnilux for people who are on the mend from various minor surgeries and want to encourage the process along. I've been under one once (not for HT). After you get over the extreme brightness, it's certainly not unpleasant.

I'm definitely going to have to switch to taking record-keeping shots immediately after haircuts. And probably in natural light. So with all the caveats that my camera technique was lax, the intense lighting casts random shadows, and that I'm sort of trying to measure for a status quo effect (arresting thinning was the most likely response, as compared with something growing in at a higher density), here is my checking-in after six months of including topical medication twice a day, and a little bit of weekly needling. My subjective feel is that I've squeezed just a little bit more resilience from these additions to the previous tablet-only based routine. And happy for a small change....unless I'm imagining it ha! I can't claim to have experienced shedding in the early months of the Minoxidil. I do prefer a brand I found where they'd gotten the alcohol content a bit lower. Left = before; right = now.

Thanks everyone. Although current events are necessarily a handbrake on plans, I'll have your collective advice in my back pocket for when things get better.

As per the title, I've been wondering if any of the initial ten days of healing would lend themselves to a sight-seeing itinerary, in either the treatment country or its surrounds. That would be excluding say the first 2-3 days, when everything is pretty tender and raw and there are follow up appointments to keep. The reasons I can think of against would include Less than great sleep during the graft healing phase Limits to what might be worn on the head as sun protection The general appearance if it was a shaved procedure In the 'reasons for' column, I've got Good 'cover story' if you're preferring not to let most of the people at home know the basis of the travel was for surgery If you're touring solo it's not like any of the people encountered on the road had an expectation of what you normally look like Passes the time during the initial period for subsiding redness I just like visiting scenic places!

Ah right, no I haven't been freelancing. In each case since I first used it (late 2017), I followed what got prescribed. But so as not to hijack the side-effects theme of this thread, I'll think of something to say about it the next time I update on how my various interventions are tracking.

I quite recently went from a daily dose of 0.25 mg (splitting a 1 mg pill into four) to 2.5 mg. So that's like a tenfold increase. The up-dosing was kind of on the doctor's whim, rather than something I was seeking. But nothing noticeable with side effects at that bigger dose.

Thanks Laser and Melvin. I'm going to have to get a lot better at taking head-selfies but here is my set to represent 2 weeks into using topical Minoxidil. About 7 weeks since the last haircut. Maybe I'll shift to taking them immediately after haircuts for better consistency.