Hello,
I had a HT in Asmed in the end of October, I used this forum for gathering information and making my decision so I'll post my progress here.
My stay in the clinic was very pleasant. There are already a number of very detailed posts here about the procedure at Asmed, mine wasn't too different so I won't go into detail about that. It's true that you only get to interact with Erdogan for about 20 minutes and the technicians are young women. Also, everyone at the clinic seemed very busy. I only care about results so I won't make judgements based on that, maybe they've managed to systemise the process enough so he doesn't need that much time to evaluate the patient.
My details:
Eastern european, 26 years old. My hairline started receding when I was 16 and at 21 my hair started thinning aggressively.
Total donor capacity estimated by Erdogan was 8000 grafts. My HT involved 5033 grafts.
Hair thickness: 56 microns; Hair/graft: 2.34
Single: 587
Double: 2380
Triple: 1834
Quadruple: 223
Quintpule : 8
Sextuple: 1
The bad news - some of the extracted grafts with 3 or more hairs already had 1-2 hairs which are dying.
Day 1 after the transplant: Anesthetic was still leaking out of my donor area. I had the most insane swelling, my head turned into a balloon and I looked like a total freak show.
Day 2-3: Swelling reduced significantly, by day 4 it was gone.
Day 5: 80% of the scabs fell off. The rest fell off gradually over the next week.
Day 10: I don't remember clearly, but I think it was around here when my donor area stopped being super sensitive.
Week 2: The redness in the scalp was mostly gone
Month 1: After I hit that mark my hair started shedding a lot
Month 2: The hair in the transplated area is thin, however the hair in my donor area still feels very dense.
One thing worth mentioning - even just a few days after the HT, there were absolutely no signs in my donor area that I've had HT. That was a pleasant surprise as I expected at least some visible scarring when my hair is super short.
Medication:
Oral minoxidil, Saw palmetto and Biotin.
They gave me one year worth of finasteride. I started taking 1mg a day but from the second day I started feeling very uncomfortable testicular pain, which freaked me out so I stopped it after a week. I was rather hesitant to try this drug to start with, so it might have been a placebo effect, but even just stressing over the potential sides is not worth it for me.
Without finasteride I'll most certainly lose a lot more hair on the crown in the next years. If this HT is successful I won't be too worried about that as I'm happy to keep my hair very short and I have very dense beard and body hair in case I run out of hair in the donor area.
I will upload photos later.
