Hair today, gone tomorrow....

Or should I say,"Hair yesterday, gone today"? One of the side effects of this surgery, is hair loss. The surgeons' guidebook/instruction manual says that a recovering patient will usually start losing hair at about three months after surgery. It states further that the hair loss should continue for a couple of months, with total hair loss reaching about one-third of the original hair volume. Regrowth would then begin at about the six-month post-surgery mark. I had read this and, intellectually, I knew that it would happen to me. But I've gotta' tell ya' that I wasn't prepared.

All my life, my hair has been very,very fine; but I have always had a lot of that very fine hair. I guess I was even a bit vain about my thick head of hair. Even when I started wearing it short all the time, and even when it went gray, I loved my hair. My gray hair was silvery white, and I loved it when so many people would tell me that I had beautiful platinum hair. It had thinned a bit with age, but there was still plenty of it. When I started losing hair by the handful about two-and-a-half months after surgery, I was a bit shocked. For almost three months my hair kept falling out. I would blow it dry after gently washing it, and a whole little cloud of silver would float down to the floor. At the end of every shower I would pull a wad of white hair from the drain grate. I was continually brushing hair from my clothes. I thought it would never stop falling out!

Finally, about two weeks ago, the hair loss began to slow down and I started losing less and less every day. I have been assessing the total damage. For one thing, instead of losing about one-third of my original hair volume, I have no more than about one-third of that beginning volume left on my head. For another thing, the hair that has fallen out has been my most beautiful platimum hair, and I am left with very fine and very thin medium blond hair shot through with darker gun-metal gray. My friend and hairdresser came up with a cut and style that will allow me to create a bit of fullness with little stress on my hair, and introduced me to hair products formulated to strengthen and help rebuild very thin hair.

In another twelve days I will reach my six-month mark, and I am waiting for the regrowth to begin. I guess I'll have to just wait and see what happens. I am hoping to have a full head of hair again by my one year "surgiversary" next March, and hoping against hope that what grows back will be that nice silvery white color that I have lost. I must admit, though, that even if my hair stays very thin and dark gray-blond, I am so happy with all the positive changes in my body that it will take a lot more than thin, non-platinum hair to get me down. It's a small price to pay for finding myself again.