Al - Moderator

A hair grows, stops growing, falls out, and a few months later a new hair starts growing in its place. This is normal and happens to everyone. So some individual hairs will be just beginning to grow and others will be long and need to be cut and others will be somewhere in between. Also not all hairs will be exactly the same thickness either. This is all normal and none of it means you are losing your hair. Miniaturization is when a large percentage of hair in one area is much thinner than hair in another area. This is usually an indicator of where hair loss will be occurring soon because hair will generally grow thinner, wispier first before no longer growing at all. Your hair appears to be looking very good in pictures, so I don't think you should be too concerned with hair loss.

I have a client of mine that comes into my business and he has one of the worst transplants I've ever seen.

 

Am I a client of yours? LOL

 

What guy has the balls to say to your face dude what is up with your hair?

I deal with the public in my job and from personal experience I can tell you that people who are drunk and/or people who are mad at me for some reason will make comments and it is usually a lot worse than simply saying what's up with your hair. It happens on a semi regular basis.

I would want to know more details of why they are doing more than 1 surgery that day. If yours is planned to be less than 2500 and the other surgery scheduled is just a touchup session of a few hundred grafts that may only take maybe 2 hours then I can see them wanting to schedule another small to mid size session the same day. The fact that he is giving you a discount only if you take a certain day may mean that they don't normally schedule more than 1 per day... unless it's just a sales technique to get you to go for the HT.

 

There's nothing wrong with getting a discount if the situation is OK. Of course it depends on who the Dr. is too, but you haven't said, so I can only comment based on the multiple surgeries in a single day.

As bad as my hair looks I will not wear a hair system (or whatever you want to call it) again. I tried that years ago and felt even worse knowing I had fake hair.

When you place grafts in an area that already has hair you will most likely experience some shock loss of the previous hair. It sounds like that's what happened. It should all grow back in a few months.

I always thought 7 to 10 days was the normal range of time for suture removal.

I had a bigger bald spot than that when I was 15. Most people who have megasession hair transplants don't even get back to the stage you are at. Stop ruining your life over something that isn't there.

I would love to be able to do a BHT transplant to fix my mess, but 6500 grafts at $8 per graft is $52000. I doubt I'll be doing it any time soon, unfortunately.

I keep saying the donor area is not permanent hair like the Drs want you to believe. This area does thin out in some people and it happens long before they reach "old" age. I posted some new pictures on my profile to show what I mean.

Mine is a very old case. I started in 1989. HT surgeries in those days consisted of only a few grafts. Most of mine were in the 50 to maybe 75 range, mostly in size from 2.5mm to 3.75mm. I think the most I ever had in one session was 122 grafts. One thing I now find really disgusting is that they did scalp reductions during the same session that they were doing a strip of 50 or 60 grafts. They had to know the strip scar would be competing for tension along with the scalp reduction. I went through the whole lawsuit thing years ago, but you can't get anywhere with a malpractice suit for elective surgery.... even if they tell you it's necessary! On top of that, in NJ it's not malpractice for someone to perform surgery without a license because malpractice can only be used against an actual Dr., so I'm not sure why anyone would ever bother to go to medical school if they want to practice in NJ. The whole thing makes no sense.

 

I finally posted a couple of pictures on my profile. I may post more in the future.

 

Bill, sorry for taking over your thread.

There's no way to really know how many available grafts you have because what you have now may not be the same as what you have in 15 or 20 years. Let's say you have 9000 grafts available today and you have a session of 2500 to strengthen your front a bit. Maybe 5 or 10 years later you need another 3000 to fill in additional loss behind the hairline and a bit in the crown. You're thinking you have 3500 grafts left, but in another 5 or 10 years when you need more work, the donor may be starting to thin a little and you may only have another 2500 grafts instead of 3500 like you thought. Right now your donor may look great, but that can change over time, so anyone who gives you a number of how many grafts is just taking a guess. Don't rely too much on it.

LETSC,

I hope it works out for you. I've had some horrible hair transplants from 20-25 years ago as well, so I know what you mean about not having the confidence to try to make it right. There's always that fear of making it even worse. Good luck to you.

I'm going to disagree. Working out has always caused my hair to fall out faster. I've never taken any kind of steroids, protein shakes, muscle building pills, etc. and I'm not on any medication. From back when I was 15 or 16 and just starting to lift weights in high school (I wanted t be a body builder) my hair fallout has always noticebly increased when I was working out. It would start maybe a week after I begin working out and the speeded up fallout rate would continue for a few months until I got so depressed that I'd stop working out. Then the fallout would slow down. This went on for years. I even stopped working out for several years and that was the slowest rate of fallout I ever had. Over the last few years I've been trying to lift weights again and of course the fallout increased again and slowed again when I stopped. At this point, I'm now 45 and don't have much hair left, so I'm more concerned about my body looking good since there was never anything I could do about the hair. I've been working out on a regular basis for about a year, which is the longest non stop time I've ever been doing it, and my hair fallout has increased ever since and has not stopped. I am completely convinced that my hair falls out faster when I lift weights or work out.

You should be rubbing the shampoo on your scalp. It's better to have a clean scalp. Any hair that comes out during shampooing was going to fall out anyway. You're just making them come out all at once rather than slowly falling out one at a time during the rest of the day.

Did you say you had 25 HTs??Literally?

 

Yes. I'm pretty sure I hold the record by far. This was a long time ago. I had 25 HT sessions which included 5 scalp reductions done between 1989 and 1994. I averaged one HT surgery about every 2.5 months for about 5.5 years. It brought on some major depression. Not from the hairloss, but the constantly having surgery and always being in the shock loss, waiting for hair to grow, doldrums period. I was at the point where I kept getting sick and having anxiety attacks just thinking about the next surgery. I wanted to kill myself, but as I said, not because of the hair loss.

 

Any time I made a suggestion of what I wanted done or how I might want the hairline to look, etc, I was told I was an extreme case and they were the Dr.s and I was in danger of permanently losing all of my hair unless I did exactly what they said. They told me several times that I was crazy for suggesting how a Dr should perform surgery and that if they did what I wanted it would be my fault if it didn't turn out correctly.

 

Prior to the HTs I had been losing hair since mid teens and it was falling out in clumps as I got to around age 19. I had stinging pain all over my head even if I just touched my hair. It was painful just to comb my hair. At that time just running my hands through my hair would give me a handful of hair. The scalp reductions were supposed to cut out the affected area so it couldn't keep spreading.

 

I find it amazing that some people come here in their mid to late 20's with a bit of mild thinning and are panicking about what to do. I wish I had that "problem". I would have never even thought about having a HT if I was slowly thinning and aging normally.

The short version:

I was losing my hair by age 15. At first my mother thought I was pulling it out myself. As it progressed, she said I needed to go to a dermatologist because her brother (my uncle) had a skin/scalp disease when he was young that caused all of his hair to fall out. The "Dr." said I had an "excessive hairloss disease" that had already progressed pretty far and if I didn't do something about it as soon as possible, I would lose all of my hair and never have any chance of getting any of it back. I then went through 25 hair transplants in an attempt to cure my condition. The first 23 were done before I knew it was MPB and the person was not a Dr. The last 2 were done by someone else in an attempt to correct the mess and make me look a bit more normal, which didn't work very well.

The numbness on the top of my head has never gone away and it's been approximately 23 years since my first HT and 18 years since the last one.

A strip scar, NW 7, no donor left, unable to cover the scar with existing hair. I have that and it's not something you want, believe me.

The whole purpose, in my view, of having these procedures is to sport a normal haircut. Short hair was better when I was thinning and now I want a real haircut.

 

 

What happens when someone who thinks that way has a HT and then later ends up with what would have been a NW7 ? Then he still has thinning hair and keeping it long looks like a combover. Going back to cutting it short and the scar shows.

 

What do you do then?

 

I would love to be able to get a normal haircut!

This is the type of HT I need. This definitely gives me some hope. Thanks for posting this. Can we get any ideas of cost involved in these types of HTs?

Right. There's been a lot of hair cloning and other such testing in mice. You'd think they would have at least tried cross transplanting on them.

2 haired grafts in the hairline is a surgical mistake in my opinion - an elementary one really.

 

 

Why? You know that 2 and 3 hair grafts occur naturally throughout your head of hair, so why is it a major concern if you get a couple of 2 hair grafts in the hairline after a transplant? You had them there years before when you had more hair in that area and you never noticed or cared, so why do you now?

I think hairthere and Sean are incorrect. There is always a percentage of hair that's in the phase where the hair has fallen out but a new hair hasn't yet begun to grow in that follicle. In that case what looks like a single hair graft can actually turn out to be a 2 hair graft. I'm imagining this scenario is more likely to occur with Drs who use fat grafts (meaning they don't trim all of the excess tissue around a graft). I'm thinking when the tech trims the tissue they may damage the portion of the graft that would have grown the additional hair, so it may not happen very often in those cases.

Corvettetester stated that "Hair loss is not a disfigurement". I tend to disagree with that although I do think there's an age factor involved. If it wasn't a disfigurement then why is it when a Dr performs a HT on a young kid maybe 8 or 10 years old who had hairloss for whatever reason do most people here feel the Dr was doing a great thing, was compassionate, helps the child not have to face ridicule or criticism, or helps the child's well being, etc? If it was normal and not a disfigurement, we wouldn't feel that? Would we?

richie48,

Your clearer way of saying it doesn't really say anything at all.

 

If you were one of the people who were not candidates for HT because of a high level of hairloss or diffuse thinning all over, you would not agree with your statement. You believe your statements are true only because they happen to be true for YOU. If I didn't lose any more hair after the point of starting my first HT then my HT would look so much better and would have been at least somewhat successful. However that is not the case.

 

Here's another way of looking at it. I've heard that about 20% of people get turned down for HT by the better Drs. If that's the case then that's 20% right off the bat that don't fit your statement of there being a safe zone, or at least not enough of a safe zone to matter. That's not even counting the percentage of people who don't even go for consultations because after researching they realize they probably aren't candidates. Out of those who have HTs I'm guessing about 20% will eventually end up losing donor hair and transplanted hair to the point of not being able to cover the scars or have enough up top to do a decent style.

 

That's around 40% of men who are not a good fit for a HT. You can disagree with my percentages as I've not studied it, but I hope you get the point. You can't look at ONLY those who have had a HT and leave out the ones who haven't had one. I can easily say 100% of anything is true if I've already weeded out all the ones that will be false.