Jae Pak at NHI

sonnyboy11 · September 9, 2008

Hi all. My first post here so go easy, eh! I recently had 850 FUTs done by Dr. Pak, along with a large scar reduction in an old donor area left behind by the unwieldly knife of Dr. Sword.

I had my first transplant back in 1994 by Sword for 1000 grafts. Later he did an additional 600. That first session left a pretty good sized scar in my donor area.

A year later, I had Dr. Petersen (Torrance, CA., no longer practicing) do another 800 grafts. After that was done, I was fairly happy although most of my original hair fell out over time and I was left with nothing but the grafts. I had a sort of pluggly look (remember this was 14 yrs ago) and I think I experienced something shrinkage as well so, after a while, I thought I might need a little more transplantation done and just evaluation in general. My Norwood scale is about a 5, so more hair was in order but my donor area and scarring really concerned me.

I did some research and consulted with Dr. Jae Pak over at NHI (I live in LA). I knew about Rassman but, like a lot of you, my pockets aren't especially deep for something like this $$. Still, it needs to be done right obviously since a screwed up transplant is worse than no transplant at all, so I met with Pak and we went over my options. First let me say about Pak that he is open-minded to whatever YOU want. He did not push any one type of solution on me. I have never been big on the idea of a lot of hair up front while my crown is nice and shiny. This seems to be a common theme for a lot of hair transplant surgeons... don't worry about the back! (yes, I did see Bosley ). I also expressed to him my concern for the scarring from previous surgeries and told him that was a primary concern.

Once nice thing we got out of the way right off the bat was that any scarring would be repaired as part of the cost of surgery, regardless of how it got there. Just getting the scar removed was $2k but there was a minimum of $3k for any surgery. This sounded reasonable to me since I wanted both scar removal and some additional hair transplanted anyway.

As I said, Pak was open-minded about what I wanted and threw out several options to enhance my own ideas. In the end, we decided to reserve about 30% of my donor harvest for the crown while the remaining 70% would be used on my front and to restore hairline. We also decided to soften my hairline by bringing it down on the temples a bit (make it more rounded up front instead of pointy), and putting slightly denser concentration of hair on the right side since I part my hair from right to left.

So how did it go? Well, like you would expect, it's way too early to tell how it will turn out. But I can tell you that Pak nabbed that scar area pretty good. I had three good sized scars from previous surgeries and he combined them into one thin scar. Then he harvested from the sides of my head where my hair was thickest. I can still see the line of staples course, but I already know that the area I used to see as a 'blank spot' after haircuts on the back of my head has been dramatically reduced. The crown and frontal transplants all took very well taken hold and I had a surprisingly minimal amount of scabbing. I have not lost any grafts.

I'd say the only down part was the meds they gave me for the surgery and post-op kicked my butt pretty well and left me out of comission for an additional day. Still, I was back to work the day after that and fortunately I can wear a hat at work so that helps. Pain... well, it hurts in the donor area. Most of you know that's going to be the case to some extent. Once I was past the first day all was well and now I just follow regiment to keep away any complications.

I'll see if I can get some pics up over time. One of the first things Pak did after the scar removal was take a snapshot and show it to me. I mean, like immediately he took shot and said "Take a look at this!". Obviously very proud of what he had done. Of course I was pretty well sedated at the time! But he really seemed happy with it and later, once the nurses were done inputting the grafts, he stated how satisfied he was with what we had accomplished.

So far I give Pak at NHI a pretty big thumbs up, but give me at least another 6-12 months and I promise I'll update here for a well-rounded opinion of his work.

Happy to answer any questions/comments if you have them.

sonnyboy11 · September 9, 2008