Here's one for the books:
Last week I headed into Dr. Bicer's clinic for my planned 3500 graft hair transplant, excited to finally knock out the transplant I've been anxiously awaiting for over a year. Upon arrival, I'm greeted by Dr. Bicer and her coordinator Ozen. The next hour or so is fairly typical: I ask Dr. Bicer a few questions, fill out paperwork, discuss potential hair lines, have my blood drawn, head shaved, etc. Things are going smoothly. At this point I'm ready for surgery so I'm fitted into a patient gown and brought to the surgery room. A technician begins the process of numbing my donor area with injections of anesthesia. This hurt like hell but was tolerable. During this period I began to notice a slight trembling in my legs, but I chalked it up to anxiety and didn't think much of it.
Once the initial does of anesthesia were administered, the technician began to prod the back of my head and asked me to let her know if I still felt even the slightest pain anywhere - if there was still some pain in a spot, she'd administer more anesthesia to that area. Crucially, she also began asking me how I felt more generally. She did a good job of asking me this every 30 seconds or so. It was somewhere at this point where I felt a wave of numbness wash over the area around my mouth and upper throat. Thinking this was strange, I informed the technician of this the next time she asked how I was doing. The technician immediately got up and informed Dr. Bicer, who herself was close by preparing for extraction work. Within seconds, Dr. Bicer moved in to take a look at me and immediately recognized that I was showing symptoms of an allergic reaction to the Lidocaine anesthetic. She stopped the procedure straight away and informed me that I was having a serious allergic reaction, and that this meant the surgery had to be aborted. She began talking with the nurses and technicians in the operating room; I don't speak Turkish but I recognized the seriousness of the situation through everyone's tone of voice and facial expressions.
At this point I noticed the numbness in and around my mouth was getting worse: my jaw felt heavy, I could hardly feel my tongue, and I was having difficulty speaking clearly. I apparently also had a massive rash on my upper chest (I didn't notice this at the time, but Dr. Bicer told me about it afterwards). The trembling I talked about earlier spread from my legs to the rest of my body and increased in severity. Mentally, I entered a confused daze and began panicking about the situation (I thought there was a good chance that my vanity was about to cost me my life, and that I would die in a foreign country). Dr. Bicer began administering oxygen to me through a nasal cannula - she said this would help the anesthesia wear off faster. She also administered some kind of emergency anti-allergy medicine to me via IV. The staff began phoning an ambulance. Dr. Bicer was speaking to me regularly at this stage, informing me that my vitals looked good but that I would be sent to a hospital out of an abundance of caution.
I was feeling much better already by the time I arrived to the hospital. It was one of the university hospitals in Istanbul, I forget the name. While there, I met with a neurologist who asked about my medical history and performed a neurological exam by asking me to open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, smile, etc. Everything looked good. I was told to stay at the hospital for about 30 more minutes to make sure nothing else popped up. Dr. Bicer was watching me this whole time and regularly asked me how I was doing. She tells me that Lidocaine is used in pretty much every hair transplant and my allergy means I'm no longer a candidate for hair transplant surgery. After this we went back to the clinic where I was refunded the cost of the procedure, and I collected my things and went back to my hotel. As you can imagine, I was mentally exhausted at this point so I took a big nap. Dr. Bicer asked me to send her regular updates on WhatsApp about how I was feeling and to return to the clinic in the morning. The next morning, I head back to Bicer's clinic and ask a few questions and say farewell to the team. I spent the remainder of the day taking a nice touristic trip through Istanbul; unfortunately it was raining and cold that day, but I enjoyed my time regardless (Istanbul really does live up to the hype, I have to say). I took my flight home the next day.
Takeaways
Hair transplants are extremely long and extremely complicated procedures. I know this forum does a good of stressing how important doctor involvement is to these procedures (not only for the final result but also for patient safety), and everyone reading this story should take it as further confirmation of this fact. I am only 29 years old with no major medical issues and have never had an allergic reaction in the past, so this incident really did come out of nowhere. God knows what would've happened if I had gone to a hair mill with poorly-trained technicians and no doctor around: the technicians probably would have dismissed my symptoms as normal and told me to calm down. Proper technician training and Dr. Bicer's presence in the operating room really saved my life here. After this incident, I would also personally no longer recommend any doctors that work on two or more patients at a given time. Things can go wrong suddenly and a medical doctor needs to be immediately available to respond rapidly to any situation. One of the main reasons I chose Dr. Bicer in the first place was because I knew she only operated on a single patient each day, and it seems my decision paid off massively.
So here ends my hair transplant journey, over almost as soon as it started. For the time being, I've resigned myself to continuing to shave my head, but I may give some thought to pursuing SMP in the future. I've been lurking on this forum for years, hoping one day to post a thread of my own chronicling my transplant progress and asking for feedback from experienced members; but alas, it seems it just wasn't in the cards for me. I did learn a lot on this forum, and I wanted to thank all the members who contributed into making this forum such a great repository of information. If it weren't for this website, I'd likely have gone to a cheap hair mill and, as I know now, that probably would've ended badly (to say the least).
Thanks again everyone.
