cg90

Hi all, I was going to wait until month 18 for the "final" update, as at month 12 nothing had improved. I wanted to see if I'm one of the weird people that continues getting improvements from month 12-18. That way I'm not concluding my happiness with the results prematurely. I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't take a pic with the same lighting/location, so consider this a mini 15 months update. Unfortunately the right side is still very weak, I still have that "oh he's starting to lose his hair" look, instead of the slick bald look I had before, I'm not sure what's better to be honest. Take today for example, I went for a run with a hat on, took it off and it looks like there are only a few hundred wispy hairs there max. I understand that a transplant is an illusion, and when less sweaty and combed it looks more like the last pic of the right side I posted here. But the left side does not have this problem at all. I want to stress that this isn't the final review, it may thicken up, or maybe I'm catching the right side during a shed. I know month 12-18 is when the hair is supposed to be more native-like in texture, which tells me a shed is expected during that window. But as of right now, I would be lying if I said I'm "happy" with the result. Considering that Bisanga typically uses 300-500 more grafts than others for similar procedures, which I saw as a selling point because it meant more density, I was hoping that meant the worst case is "good" and the best case is "great", but what I have is great on the left side and not good on the right side. It's very likely nothing will improve from now until may, so my plan is to just work with this. Whenever I lose more hair over the years, enough to justify a second procedure, I'll ask whatever doctor I go with then to patch up the right side. Month 18 update I'll make sure to include pics to match the others here for better comparison.

I wouldn't say it's bad, it's still better than what I had, it's just currently not what I was hoping based on the years of research and extra cost. But it could just be the right side is going through a cycle that leaves it in a not ideal spot for a few months. It looked a little denser in the six months pics, though my hair was longer so not sure if that's why. I'll wait until month 12 before I make a final assessment, as we all know this is a 12 months process. To answer your question, in more natural light, the right side looks more like I'm losing my hairline, whereas before it was slick bald and could just be perceived as "he's got a naturally high hairline". Don't know if that makes sense? The left side looks good though, hopefully the right side finally catches up.

Hi all, Back for the nine months update. Got to be honest, not feeling positive about the results at the moment. You can see that the right side is quite sparse, which is more disappointing due to very carefully picking a doctor that uses more grafts than others. Which means I paid more and used up more of my graft budget for results that don't seem to compare with results using less grafts. Maybe I'm one of the few that don't get the stellar results you see all over this forum. Or maybe months 9-12 will turn things around. But it doesn't look as dense as 2259 grafts should look, based on the many many threads I've seen over the last four years. Anyway, I'll report back for the twelve months update. Hopefully it'll be a more positive report.

Hi all, Tomorrow will be six months, but I figured I'd do the update now before I forget. Month 4-5 was not much different to the month 3 update, probably a little bit better, but not noticeable. It was when I hit the 5 months mark that I started to get concerned. In my previous updates, I expressed a lack of urgency for results because I was able to style my hair as before, so no rush. 4 weeks ago I had a look underneath the curtain and was hoping I'd have that Bisanga trademark early growth that would allow me to start styling my hair differently. But nope, very patchy and unusable. One of the main reasons I picked Bisanga was because most of his patients here had great results within 3-5 months, so when I went past that date range I was starting to worry. Fortunately I recalled a case (or two) here where the results didn't happen, then in month 6 it exploded. I think that is happening to me now, as in the last two weeks there has been significantly more growth occurring, it's close to being usable. If I'm at 50% now, then double of this density won't be perfect, but usable, which is the goal for me. A perfect hairline is unrealistic, and even if achieved, it'd look weird in a way. Guys I see with great hair don't have perfect hairlines, so if mine turned out so, it'd be sus. Anyway, next update will be in 3 months (month 9), so maybe by then I can be a bit more adventurous with my style. I'm aiming for something maturer (for when I get older and greyer), but also isn't impacted by the wind\rain, even if the exposed hairline is no longer a problem. For now, or for the next couple of months, I'll do some experimenting behind the scenes, but in public do what I've always done.

Had the same experience with the value stay hotel with the added pain of the shower not working. Fortunately I was only there for two nights.

3 months update. Not much to say that I haven't already said, just carrying on as before while waiting for everything under the curtains to cook up nicely. Still haven't got my hair cut by my usual barber, I'm curious to know whether she notices anything when I do go some time in the next month. Oh one thing that's different is that the slight tenderness I mentioned in my last post disappeared a couple of days afterwards. Now everything feels 100% back to normal. Edit: Anyone know why the orientation of the uploaded pics are always wrong?

Um, probably a little thinner on the side donor based on some pics I posted here in one of the early updates. But 1) it's far better than a temporary bald spot that some guys get 2) it's not noticeable unless intentionally comparing like I am now and 3) it might just be the lighting in my bathroom. I've had this hairstyle since I was 22 (currently 32) so who knows how long I've had this receded hairline, could have been longer than the six years I'm mentioned in the initial post. If you can, definitely go partial shave, as it's a massive weight off the mind to know you've done something about this without having to see it. Also knowing that I went with one of the best doctors in the world that has a ton of very good results on this site helps a lot. At this current moment, yeah I'm glad I finally did it. But ask me again in 3.5 months when I'm at month 6 and we'll see if that answer changes 😄

I paid the standard price, which I think is Bisanga does extractions and recipient prep, the rest of the time was the placements by two ladies. I think there is the "Bisanga does everything" package which is a lot more, but seems kinda pointless when everyone is trained by him. Dr Kostis was with another patient at the time, so I only saw him when signing forms and when I was leaving. I'm just over two months in and basically 80-90% of the hair fell out a couple of days after my one month update. All that's there at the moment is the native hair that was shaved into a little, which is awkwardly 1/3 the length of the untouched native hair. Still very easy to hide and I rarely think about the procedure, I'm basically where I was pre-procedure which is "I really hate my hairline but everyone thinks I'm NW1". So I'm just going to continue to forget about this and only assess what's cooking underneath when I do the month 3, 6, 9, 12 updates here. I will say there is a tiny bit of tenderness about an inch above the recipient area that I notice when washing my hair sometimes, but that could be the minor nerve damage that can take 3-6 months to fully heal. The donor area was very tender during the first week, but no problems since and I'm amazed at how untouched it looked within a couple of days. Ian has sent me some pics taken immediately after the procedure, posting those here for the curious. I didn't experience the really bad swelling until day 2, but looking at these pics, it looks like it started immediately. I'll post some current pics for the month 3 update in 3.5 weeks time.

Month 1 update. Got my partner to trim my hair last week, which has mostly blended in the native I kept and the area shaved, so I'm one step closer to being where I was pre-procedure. Not really stressed or even thinking about this due to being able to easily hide it, I also added a pic of how i currently style it at the moment. <Edit> I don't know why some of the pics are orientated wrong, the source pics are correct. Don't know how to correct them in the post.

Oh I forgot the graft numbers. 445 ones 1245 twos 569 threes 2259 total No fours used, probably saved for the NW4-7 region in the future.

Yep, thought it'd be something weird like that. The new email went to my spam, I've marked it as not spam and will ping you a reply soon-ish 👍

Here are some pics I sent to Ian before booking. And a pic taken of me with how I usually styled it.

Me right now, not done anything to it, just to give others an idea of how you can use your native hair to hide (I wish more threads did this as it was a big thing for me).

Day 10 (yesterday)

Day 7

Day 5

Day 2 or 3, not sure.

Apologies for the lack of quality and quantity of the pics, like I said I was planning to just forget about this. Day 1

Hi, I wasn't sure whether I would create a thread on this due to wanting to get it out of the way and move on by not thinking about it, once I can hide with my native hair (which I'm very please to report has been possible since day 10). But a nagging voice in my head over the last week has convinced me that I should give back to the forum that helped me massively. Backstory So where do I begin? All my life up to age 25 I was always envied for my thick brown hair and grew up being told by my barber that always cut my hair up until age 22 that "you will never lose your hair, you're very lucky!". I won't bore with my life story, but let's just say I don't know what the hair situation is with my father or anyone on his side of the family, and my mother's side consists of a tiny amount of girls with thick NW1-2's. Fast forward to 2015 (age 25), I started taking weight lifting more seriously, so part of that meant taking creatine. I noticed I was clogging up the shower, which had never been the case before, but thought nothing of it because I'll never lose my hair right? I then stopped taking creatine after a month of shedding and haven't shedded like this since, years later I remembered this and looked up if creatine causes hair loss and apparently it spikes up DHT sensitivity or something like that, not saying that is the cause of my situation, though the timing was interesting. Anyway for some reason, I decided to take a look at my hairline, something I've never thought to do as my hairstyle had always unintentionally hid it (swept over messy style using putty). And to my horror, the temples were much higher than I expected, which completely rocked my world. For the years following, I spent an obsessive amount of time looking up ways to fix this, tried every supplement/technique I could find to no avail. Another year went by and after giving up hope I can reverse this, I started looking at FUE clinics, which led me to this site. After another year of on and off researching the best doctors in Europe, one name came up by far the most and all of his results on this site have been at a minimum very good, some being amazing. So in 2018 I went to a consultation with Dr Bisanga while he was in the UK. Consultation 1 (2018) The doctor and Hilde were very surprised to see me walk in because like I said, I was easily able to hide my recession. Dr Bisanga then drew the hairline, which required a lot more grafts than I expected (2000), I was expecting 1000-1500. It seems to be the case that he uses a lot more grafts than other doctors from what I've seen, but his results are undeniable. After discussing with my patient advisor, it seems to be a mixture of needing more grafts to match my thick native hair and reinforcing hair that may not look that weak, but would be good to future proof, plus he likes to use single hair grafts for hairlines. Anyway, I asked if there were any slots the next month (november, just before winter kicks off), but there wasn't any, so I went back to trying to resolve this by some less intrusive means. Booking the procedure The next few years were mostly me moving on and just carrying on hiding my temples, then brief periods of strongly considering doing the procedure, rinse repeat. The pandemic then happened, which put me off doing anything involving travel for two years. It wasn't until the last period of being bummed out about my hair that I saw two threads here in particular, this one which looks very similar to my hairline (basically where the strong widows peak makes the temple recession look worse than it actually is) and this one where he kept his native in a way where he could hide any trace of the procedure within a month. I then spoke to my partner who at this point was sick of me going back and forth on this over the years and told me to just book it, so I did. My patient advisor over the last two years was Ian, who was the other big reason why I chose Dr Bisanga. I never felt like just a customer with him, he would tell me things that would risk putting me off doing the procedure, but was the honesty I needed to hear before going through with this. Consultation 2 (2022) aka day -1 After 5 months of pre surgery anxiety, I finally travelled to Brussels, this was the first time I travelled abroad alone, which made things more mentally taxing. I didn't want to bring my partner as I didn't want this vanity project to impact her life in any way, even though she wanted to come to help. I checked into the value stay which is about 100m away from the clinic, the first thing the guy at the desk said to me was "how is Dr Bisanga?", which startled me. I asked how he knew and he said "every young man that comes on their own for two days comes for the doctor". A few hours later I went to the pre-op consultation and it was mostly the same experience as the first one four years prior. While booking, I was quoted 2500 grafts, which was even more than the 2000 from 2018 that I thought was already too much. But I thought maybe the doctor could see more recession that I couldn't from the last four years, to me everything had stayed the same since I first noticed this problem 7 years ago. The doctor drew the hairline and I asked "this is for 2500 correct?", to which he was surprised to hear and said "oh no, 2000". I put all my faith into whatever decisions he makes regarding my hair as he's the expert, but fortunately I was happy with the first hairline. I did intend to only bring the temples down around 3cm so that I would have a strong NW2, mostly because I didn't want to use up 2500 or more grafts, but after the doctor drew much lower temples at 500 grafts less than I was quoted, I thought "why not? If I'm going to go through all of this, might as well enjoy the result more". The other reason being that I thought lowering the temples near to my widows peak would be silly due to how low it is, but the doctor designed a nice triangular shape from it. Procedure day I was told the night before that the Dr would like me to come in an hour later than agreed due to them having a late finish, which I was more than happy to do. When arriving, I had to sign some forms and was escorted to a room to get my head shaved. The woman's english was not good, as she tried to tell me, so I figured I'd double check with her that we're only shaving the back and sides. I'm so glad I did because she seemed surprised and called the doctor, who then said some stuff in french and did the shaving instead. Big relief as being able to hide the procedure was a big deal for me. I was then taken for pictures and went back into a room where the op would take place. The doctor could see I was very nervous, so gave me some valium, which I didn't feel anything from, but didn't question it. I was then told to lie on my left side and was given the dreaded injections I heard about, even the doctor said "this is the part everyone dreads the most". But honestly, it was about 4/10 in terms of pain, even worse was that I apparently had more injections than average as I was quite a bleeder (I learned this afterwards). Once the doctor finished the extractions, he then created the channels and then around noon, I had a really nice beef noodle lunch. At this point, I thought the end was near and was keen to get back in and get this whole thing over with. Little did I know that the graft placements, done by two very nice nurses, would take longer than the extractions\channelling combined times two. After three hours, I was getting very restless, plus the constant random spraying of very cold water didn't help. We finally finished and I attempted to get up but was a little light headed, at this point is when I learned I was a bleeder, so was given a coke and water before attempting to get up again. The doctor explained to me that he used 2259 instead of 2000 as he wanted to address some thinning in the widow's peak that I was not aware of. I trust his decision and if he wants to future proof more so that I don't need to do another procedure for an extra couple of years, then all good with me. I mean, if he did the opposite and took away the peak completely, I would have been cool with that too as I hate how low it is. Back at the hotel, I tried to have an early night, but wasn't possible due a lot of shouting and noise throughout the night. Day 1 After attempting to wash with a broken shower, I walked to the clinic for a donor clean and post op info dump. Hilde was amused by my odd swelling, I don't know how else to describe it other than my forehead became a temporary butt. She then throughly cleaned my donor, showed me what to do with the post op stuff, then booked me a taxi to the station. I won't go into detail about the journey home because that's not relevant and this post is already too big, but let's just say you will have to get used to the stares from people. Post op care I followed the post op instructions religiously, even saline spraying during the night when I would inevitably wake up. I didn't really scab, possibly due to the excessive saline spraying, I just had some crusting. I asked Ian if this is something I should be concerned about, but I must be unlucky as he hasn't replied to my email since day 3 (I'm now at day 11), maybe it went to spam or he's on vacation, he's usually really fast with responding. Fortunately I've done enough research on this process over the years to deal with the last week of recovery on my own. Due to the higher than average injections I mentioned earlier, it meant I spent day 2 and 3 with very very bad swelling, and that's with constant icing and sleeping upright! The donor seems to be healing really well, from day 3 it was already hard to see anything suspicious. Current thoughts I still can't believe I did it, my brain must have tried 1000's of times to talk me out of it during the days leading up to it, even when my initial flight was delayed it was saying "ah well you tried, not your fault the plane is delayed, try again next winter", but honestly I was sick of hiding. I'm 32 now, so not too young to lose hair like when I first discovered this problem, and the loss never progressed visually since, so it seemed to make sense to do it now. I justified it to myself as the worst case scenario being that I lose more hair over time and if I decide to admit defeat, I'll have a great hairline that will make buzzing down look 100x better than the 1950's vampire hairline I had. The best case scenario being that in 4-5 months time, I can style my hair how I want and not in the one way that hides the temples, or do the same style but not because I'm hiding anything, which is a very liberating thought. The procedure itself wasn't too bad, just takes what feels like forever. I was more bothered by the random cold water spraying than the injections. The recovery period has been fine, the swelling was rough but not painful, the post op maintenance isn't too involved, so it's mostly just chilling at home for a week or two while keeping your native hair away from the recipient. Definitely make sure you have a water spray as it can get very messy if you use a cup of water. Oh and if you can avoid the value stay hotel, do so. I powered through because of the convenience of being just a one minute walk from the clinic and wanted to reduce logistics as much as possible, but if you can get someone to drive you, stay somewhere less noisy and basic. I have some photos on my phone which I'll post in this thread once I click send on this laptop, hopefully this thread is of some use to anyone else considering getting their hair did by Dr bisanga.

How are you styling your hair atm?

Any updates on this?

I'm also getting FUE with Bisanga later this year and I'm particularly interested in cases where the patient kept their native hair, like this one. Could you also show us how you're using your native hair to hide your recipient area? I'm guessing you just brush forward, at least that's how I plan to use it. Any tips for others looking to keep their native hair? I'm guessing you used hair clips for the first week to keep the native away from the recipient? When did you start washing your hair as you would before the procedure without needing to be careful?

I would like to know this too

I feel like four out of five threads on Dr Arshad explains that he thinks more grafts are needed on the day. I'm guessing he's charging for these extra grafts too. If so, it's starting to sound like a con. Makes you think you're spending X amount, then last minute you're paying thousands more because of an extra 500 grafts. Is this common practice? I've looked at a lot of threads with other doctors and can't recall seeing this happen, but it consistently happens with Dr Arshad.

Just been looking at a few threads on Dr bisanga's work like this one and can't help but notice that the redness sticks around for many months. Are there ways to reduce it faster? Like putting aloe Vera gel on the area from two weeks after the procedure or something?