Al - Moderator

What you should have done was had an in-person consultation with a HT Dr near you before committing to this surgery. Then you'd have a good idea of your hair situation and can make a more informed decision on what to do. It's not a great idea to end of having to make those decisions on the day of surgery like what happened to you. You want to have an idea of your situation before you go there. The Dr has never seen you before, so you can't expect him to know your situation.

You did get 5003 grafts which is a large amount and it looks like you got decent density all over with those grafts, so I wouldn't be so down about it thinking you wasted a lot of money for nothing.

16 hours ago, salsazio said:

I wanted to ask you In your opinion, how much donor do I have left?

It doesn't look like your donor was all that great to begin with, so you may not have much left after taking over 5000 grafts. You'll have to wait at least 6 months until it grows back in to see how dense (or not) it is.

The density seems OK. It's hard to tell what it actually looks like this early after the HT because you still have a lot of blood on the grafts. Once the scabs come off you will have a much better idea of what it all looks like.

Looks good.

You most likely have at least some shock loss, so I would guess it will look better than it does now after several months. There’s no way to tell how much though. 5500 grafts is a lot to take out, so you’re going to be thinner in the donor area compared to before the transplant. 

This looks awesome.  

Hi @Paul J. Welcome to the forums. Thank you for posting. How many grafts did Dr Cooley give you.

I hope you don't mind, but I changed the title of the post to spell the Drs name correctly.

Very good density. It seems to all blend together very well.

Very nice result.

I would love to see a picture of the graft placement on the temple points.

Looks like this turned out very well.

It's a bad idea. It basically ends up being an organ transplant. You risk having your body attack the grafts as foreign objects and killing all the grafts. You could even be risking your life and you may need to be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of your life.

The only possible positive these days is that grafts are so small now that it may be possible to do it without triggering a severe immune reaction, but then again you'd be transplanting thousands of grafts, so that would seem to negate any idea of getting away with it.

I wouldn't do it.

Just try changing shampoos. You don't have to use any specific one. If the one the clinic gave you or recommended you use is drying your scalp out too much or burning your scalp, then just stop using it and try something else.

Bloxham tries to limit the width of the strip so there's not too much tension. A thinner strip will generally give you a lower chance of scar stretching. Hasson & Wong like to push the limits of how wide a strip they can get for higher NWs that could use more grafts.

Did you get any infections in the grafts shortly after the HT  in the areas where there is poor growth? 
if you go for another try I would do a small session of no more than 1000 grafts spread out over the entire area so there’s no dense packing of any. This way you can be sure the grafts get blood supply. If that’s successful after a year then you can go back and do another small one to fill in any areas that still need some filling in. 

You really should check out our list of recommended Drs

https://hairtransplantnetwork.com/best-hair-transplant-surgeons

You can't use grafts from someone else. It won't work. No Dr will do it.

You have a lot of hair loss, but from the back picture it looks like your donor is still thick. There's just not a lot of donor area to use.

You can use beard and chest grafts if you need them depending on their quality, but back hair or hair from anywhere else usually doesn't grow very well and isn't worth trying unless you were an extreme case with no other donor to use.

1 hour ago, hairyhopes said:

Once I (hopefully) start seeing some growth I'll share updates.

Yes. Please do that once the growth starts.  Where I live gets cold in Winter, so I prefer to have a hair transplant at the beginning of Winter, so then I can wear a hat or hoodie whenever I go out without anyone thinking anything.

Well you can certainly try PRP if you wanted to. It's not going to hurt her. There's no real risk of something going wrong... at least not that I've ever heard of. The only thing you lose is money if it doesn't improve her hair. So I guess it's worth a try if you think it has a better shot at improvement in her case as opposed to a man experiencing male pattern baldness. If it was my girlfriend I'd probably go with her to a consultation with a Dr who offers it and see what they say.

I will suggest another thing you may want to try. I know a lot of people don't think this works, but I would look into trying a laser hat. I don't think it does very much for male pattern baldness, but I do think it may help in some cases like you are saying she is. I'm not an expert in it, but I did try using a laser comb years ago and I think it did have a small positive effect on an area around my FUT strip scar. I had some shock loss areas around a scar that just never grew back more than a few tiny hairs and I felt the laser comb kicked a few of those hairs into growing a little longer. 

Good luck. I hope she finds something that works.

Eyebrows are not easy to get right and a pain to maintain. The hairs need to be implanted very angled and facing a certain way. Afterwards once they grow in if the grafts came from the scalp they will grow long and you will have to constantly trim them every few days to keep hem at a proper length.

Maybe this guy had a hair transplant in the font half.  It's hard to se with this video.

In addition to what I said about using beard and chest hair, you also need to make sure the Dr you are considering has good experience with using body hair grafts. Not all hair transplant Drs will use body hair grafts. It's harder to extract and usually takes a little bit longer. Now you may not need to use any of it all. It really depends on how good or bad your scalp donor is and what your goals are as far as coverage.

13 hours ago, Vader_1 said:

Can donor hair follicles be harvested from areas other than your head? I’ve heard mixed feedback on this. I have plenty of healthy hair on my chest and arms that could be great donor follicles. I know I can't exclusively use those for the transplants, but can they be mixed in with head hair donor follicles, so I maintain donor regions for the future?

Beard hair works best with chest hair being next best, however I wouldn't use chest hair unless your scalp donor wasn't good enough to get decent coverage and you needed a significant amount of body hair and didn't have that great of a beard that would yield enough grafts. For arm, leg, and back hair I wouldn't even consider using that in your case. I wouldn't touch that unless scalp, beard, and chest were already used up, so basically it would only be a very few extreme cases.

Shedding hair after a hair transplant is normal and it does generally start to happen a couple of weeks after the transplant. This is the process for stress induced hair loss even if it weren't a hair transplant. If you get very sick you could experience hair loss. It will happen a few weeks afterwards. This happens with some women after pregnancy also. A couple of weeks afterwards they may experience some hair loss. So it doesn't only occur due to hair transplants.

You will definitely get more improvement after 5 months.

Hello @thedominator. Welcome to the forums. Thanks for posting your question. It looks like you definitely have some recession going on. You say it hasn't changed over the past 10 years, but the hairline looks rather high, so I'm wondering if it actually has been slowly moving over the years, but you just haven't noticed because it's a slow process I'd try to compare your current hair line with some older pictures of yourself to be sure. The rest of your hair seems to be doing pretty well with maybe some very slight thinning towards the crown, although it looks like that could be just your hair naturally parting and growing away from each other in that area. Hair is always constantly falling out and regrowing, so seeing some hair fallout is normal. I'd say if they are long, thick hairs that fall out then that's a good sign that they are probably not falling out prematurely.