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This last spring, Mister Man set up a lunch date for me to meet with a local TV celebrity and Alopecia Totalis battler. During a weekday lunch hour, I sat across from her listening to her story and her continuous struggle over accepting her condition. She had had it for less than a year, in her 50s, she woke up one morning to find her pillow littered with her hair. Her Alopecia Areata turned into Totalis within months. I listened to her desperation to find something to cure her, her travels to see specialists, and her list of medications to relieve her now all consuming anxiety. We cried together as we shared our common (new) fear of rain and wind, our appreciation for good hair pieces, and our loving husbands. I saw in her the other direction Alopecia can take someone. Being without the funds to make it my drive to be cured, I had to take the acceptance route.
Alopecia is like the second personality, it's underlying and exists parallel to myself. I love my life completely, I have never been happier and feel joy in my soul's core for every single day. It's the wind, rain, reflection, and picking up my own hairs that remind me of this other thing that's happening, my other identity. Until my lunch meeting, my alopecia self was separate from my own self.
A week later I lost all my new growth and then some. Defeated, I could no longer take the obsession AA was demanding of me. I stopped counting hairs, looking up articles and medical progressions being made and other people's blogs of their AA journey. I stopped wearing my hair extensions out of the paranoia that the weight of them was pulling out more hairs. I stopped using prescription topical steroids and over the counter Rogain. I stopped taking pictures to chart this unchartable disease. I simply stopped participating and realized what will be will be, and I have no control over it.
I began a routine which included a multitude of vitamins and supplements three times a day. Wheat grass, Vitamins C, A, B, D, E, and fish oil, Biotin, Nature's Bounty Hair, Skin, and Nails, and something called Viviscal which is a marine based supplement. I also stopped making a "lack of time" an excuse for not exercising and instead found time. I haven't had another cycle of shedding in 4 months. That's the longest I have been able to hold on to the hairs my follicles have been trying to produce since I came down with AA. And I can now say for sure that I'm actually experiencing fluffy baby hair coverage. What was once a patch as smooth as a baby skin now feels like a healthy peach.
I'm ecstatic, obviously, but I am also nervous. I know I'll never be cured because there's isn't a cure. I can have another shed or complete loss at any time, I'm prone to it and my anxiety is hypersensitive from this. I don't want to put too much weight on my regrowth and being able to keep it...but it does make me happy.
Out of all the blogs I've read from everyone out there experiencing AA, the OCD part of me that developed over the course of my own AA found those with pictures more useful...just so I could compare mine to their's. And so, I'm sharing some of the photos I took over the course of 14 months of my patch.
The first picture I took, when I realized something was wrong and it wasn't going to get better on it's own and then 2 weeks later:
3 weeks later, I thought I was experiencing regrowth, but then 2 weeks after that you can see how the AA moved "south." I realized then that the short hairs along the "southern" boarder wasn't regrowth but the breakage of hair that happens before they fall out from the root. The
"northern" short hairs was actual regrowth.
Fall 2012, it held pretty steady. You can still see how it's moving "south" as that's where it thins out before it sheds out completely, then thinning further down.
Winter 2012-2013.
"northern" short hairs was actual regrowth.
Fall 2012, it held pretty steady. You can still see how it's moving "south" as that's where it thins out before it sheds out completely, then thinning further down.
Winter 2012-2013.
Today.
