Sometimes it's not so bad, but other times the bitterness gets to me quite a lot, and today is one of those days. Of course, ultimately I can only blame myself for my problems. Sure, there were mitigating factors: The manipulative hard-sell tactics of the NuHart hair transplant clinic; I started noticeably losing my hairline at 19 years of age; Internet forums that are ubiquitous today were practically non-existent in the early 90s; I believed that doctors were on our side and they only got into medicine to help people; I was young and naive and panicking about my hair loss.
But I still can't stop blaming myself.
Sure, I felt like I was on a sinking ship and losing control of my life, but why didn't I recognize the signals? That's what bothers me the most. It's as if once I made the decision to get a hair transplant, you could have shown me what I would look like in the future and I still wouldn't have stopped myself. Some driving force pushed me past all of my intuition and internal alarms about what this would potentially do to my life. I can step back and analyze it now and say that it didn't really matter about the potential result because the thing that bothered me even more than losing my hair was losing control. I guess in some sense they are one in the same, but the hairloss was just an immediate and tangible manifestation of everything in life that we can't control, so by getting a hair transplant I was taking action- regardless of the outcome I was not sitting back and letting this thing happen to me uncontested.
Generally though, as we get older and more mature, we learn to embrace and accept these things to some extent- losing hair at 30 isn't the same as losing it at 19. Some might say that it's devastating at any age, but I don't believe it is the same for one simple reason: our brains aren't fully developed until we are about 25 years of age. Specifically, the part of the brain that regulates risky behavior and understand the action/consequence relationship isn't fully developed until that age; insurance companies know this, which is the exact reason why you can't rent a car on your own until you are over 25- I'm starting to think the same rule should apply to plastic surgery. And while I feel I deserve a lot of the blame, the truth is that any ethical doctor would have turned me away and explained to me why getting hair transplants is a bad idea at such an early age. However, NuHart was more than happy to take my money and cut a huge chunk of skin out of the back of my head. In fact, they took 3 chunks when it was all said and done.
So, anyway, once I saw the hairline start to recede I just lost it. I felt as though my social life was being taken from me before I even had a chance to live it. In fact, I had been looking forward to going out to bars and doing all the things that young people look forward to doing, but by the time I hit 21 my hair loss was so extensive I didn't even get carded the first time I was able to legally drink! So I tried shaving my head, wore hats, started working out more, but the self-esteem inevitably suffered. I lost my mojo. Relationships stared to suffer. People started to give me the whole "dude are you losing your hair?" questions. I got depressed, and saw everything that I took for granted flash before my eyes. Of course, NuHart was more than willing to capitalize on the insecurities of a young man who is psychologically unstable, and their late-night infomercials were designed to target the guy with low self-esteem who comes home from for yet another night alone and feeling sorry for himself, and looking for answers.
I must also note at this point that I often felt and still feel guilty about even feeling bad for myself. After all, there is always somebody worse off- someone with terminal cancer or a burn victim or someone with some disfigurement, and many of them are able to just get on with it, while I sit here and wallow in my own self-pity for something that I did to myself. But I must tell you brothers, it doesn't matter. I've tried the whole "cup is half full" philosophy but it really never works for me. You are always invariably faced with a situation that brings the issue back to the forefront, to a place that's really impossible to ignore. Additionally, there's a social stigma attached to someone who tried to improve their looks via surgery, so all of this just compounds the desire to just isolate yourself from society altogether.
Don't believe me? Imagine this: your Mother has just died from a long bout with cancer, and your overriding thought leading up to and throughout her funeral is how stressful the ceremony is going to be because everyone will be able to how much hair you've lost, and they will also notice the transplants. Yes, I very seriously thought about skipping my own mother's funeral, and during the funeral I was ridden with overwhelming anxiety and guilt, not only for the loss, but also because I couldn't give all of my attention to her memory. There were times during that period when I really did not care if I was alive or dead.
Want to hear another one? OK, imagine your best friend since you were a child is getting married and asks you to be the best man at his wedding. Imagine you are so terrified of the thought of being in front of people and being exposed that you tell your friend you can't do it, and you ultimately avoid the wedding, the bachelor party, and the reception. In fact, you are so humiliated and guilt-ridden about this that you basically stop talking to your friend because you feel like you've let him down and that you are not worthy of his friendship. All of this because you had hair transplants at a young age and now feel like a fool because you are losing more hair and the transplants are obvious to anyone who takes a closer look. In fact, at times I feel subhuman and don't want to be around people at all, even to the point where I would give up a 20 year friendship out of feelings of guilt and worthlessness.
And girls? Well, what if you get close with someone? Eventually you will have to take your hat off and you will be exposed. So you stop even trying. I can go on and on about the relationships I've dissolved because of this nightmare, about the girls that I've let go, only to see them thriving in happy marriages with kids. It has all passed me by.
But it wasn't bad the entire time.
In fact, for about a year or so after the first transplant, I had a brief resurgence. I dated more girls than I did in the past, as if I were making up for lost time. Whereas I had been a relationship person when I didn't have the hair issues, I suddenly became more of a casual sex person in direct relation to the decrease in my self-esteem, as if I needed to prove something to myself and go out with as many women as possible. But it didn't last long- I could see that I would need another transplant soon, since my type of diffuse hair loss was pretty much impossible to keep up with. So, I listened to the "doctors" at NuHart and was convinced I needed a second surgery to "keep up" with the hair loss. Well, this is where things started to go awry, because while people didn't say anything before, now they were starting to notice. You can't underestimate the value of hair, even if it's miniaturized, because getting transplants accelerates the loss of even the thinner hairs, thus diminishing the effectiveness of the transplant altogether- the combination of bad transplanting technique (hair angled in unnatural directions) and diffuse loss made for a terrible combo, and made the transplant pretty much see-through in various lighting situations. I guess this is why they say you are always playing catch-up with your hair loss if you don't plan correctly or if you are a bad candidate. In my case, what was a thinning overall pattern with a receding hairline quickly turned into just visible transplants on top, in a very unnatural pattern.
Even so, it might not have been that bad if they hadn't been so terrible at transplanting the hairs- I've seen guys who had transplants in the 90s who don't look nearly as bad as I do, but they went to good clinics like Bernstein Medical or other reputable doctors. In my case, the poor technique left pits and scars and ridges all over my hairline, so that even if I wanted to remove the hairs or buzz the head down my scalp looked totally disfigured.
So, what kinds of things do people say when they notice something about your hairline that looks off?
"Your transplants are really starting to come in nicely," said one co-worker with a wry smile on his face...of course he made sure he said it in front of other people.
"Did you get plugs or something? Your hair look like doll's hair" said another.
And of course my favorite: "Dude, what the F*ck happened to your head?"
So thus began the path to my demise. I have been living the past 14-15 years or so wearing a hat in public at all times, and I haven't had a relationship for years. My only saving grace is that I have a job that allows me to wear a hat, and my dad has allowed me to move back in with him so I can save money for repair surgeries, although I haven't mentioned anything about it to him. I'm so uncomfortable talking about it that I don't even discuss it with my immediate family, so this truly is my only outlet at the moment. I have had some repair surgeries already, but I will still need more in order to get to a point where I will feel OK without a hat in social situations. I do have a plan, and I'll talk more about what I've done and what I'm going do to fix my problem, and what I've learned along the way so other repair guys can maybe avoid the same mistakes I've made in the repair process. More to come...
