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Nobel Victim; Unplugged in Atlanta
Preamble- I have been posting as Nobel Victim for quite some time on forhair, hairtransplantnetwork & hairloss help. My first experience with hair transplantation was about 8 years ago at the Nobel Clinic, London, which I can say was, without doubt both the worst decision and worst experience of my life. Some horrible compacted micro and mini grafts, painfully extracted with a multi bladed knife inserted into gaping slits forming visible ridges and scars.
Anyhow, I made a very good decision to have this work improved by Dr Cole and his team in Cyprus 14 months ago, and although I was more than pleased with the work done (see the thread Nobel Victim goes to Cyprus) Dr Cole evidently was not, as within a week of getting back to the UK from Cyprus he had made the incredibly kind offer to finish off the work in Atlanta!
My Atlanta surgery booked for Monday the 25th of August, so I flew out from England on the Sunday and arrived thoroughly tired and worn out, this seemed like a good plan when I booked the tickets as I thought being busy would give me less time to worry, but
Mon 25th Hair line refinement
Now the provisional plan for the second session had been to remove just a few of the Nobel Clinic plugs and to bury them with another wave of strip fu’s, as I have a donor scar anyway I figure there isn’t much point worrying about the back of my head. But as the clinic were generally very pleased with the state of my hair it was decided to do as much un-plugging and de-bulking as possible and then fill in with a little fit after the plugs had been re-implanted as follicular units.
Now when I saw Dr Cole in Cyprus I was asked to pick out a couple of DVD’s to watch, but my first task when I got into the surgical chair in Atlanta was to pick out 4 movies! So this was going to be a long day! I should say how nice it was to meet both T. ^^^ for the first time and Nelson, Thomas & Patrick who I had seen in Cyprus last year who all made a point of making me feel welcome, along with the whole team in fact.
So the preparation began by injection of local aesthesis; I’m not sure if many prospective patients know or worry about local aesthesis, but I can assure anyone that I am a total wuss, soft boy, girls blouse etc. I have fainted when having a TB jab, so believe me I don’t laugh in the face of a needle. But you really don’t feel much at all. Because my surgery was going to take a bit I think I had one section done at a time.
My most ugly grafts were to either side of my widows peek where I have less natural, (IE transplanted) hair to hide them so I think my left side was anesthetised first. Basically one of Dr C’s brilliant tec’s injected me along what I would guess would be a two to three inch length of scalp before slowly plumping up the same area with fluid (to raise the follicles and skin from the veins and nerves below to minimise the amount of trauma to the skin). This feels a lot like your skin being kind of tight and almost ‘crunchy’, it is pumped up after all and it feels like it has lost its pliability and become kind of rigid, I have no idea whether or not this is the case!
Anyhow, plug removal, sounds gross, and I bet that if I saw it, it would be gross. But from a patients perspective it felt fine. Basically it felt a lot like when you are fiddling with the stem of an apple, you can feel its stuck, you and feel it would stay well in place if left alone but you also know that with one good tug… I really don’t mean this as a metaphor, it was how it felt, with my skin plump and hard like an apple and with a slightly crunchy feeling as Dr Cole set about extracting the plugs, just like the flesh of an apple. I hope that dons’t sound too gross, because believe me it was fine, I love apples and would hat anyone to lose their appetite for them due to a reckless blogg.
In many ways this was such a nice experience as most of the team had popped in during this time and you could really feel the camaraderie of the team, Dr Cole had just been asking after my mum, T. ^^^ was telling me about his trip to Vegas, and everyone was just being massively reassuring, calm and above all fascinated by their work.
In hindsight this was a very weird experience too though, due to the trust I have in Dr Cole and his team from my trip to Cyprus I really hadn’t given a lot of thought of how the plugs would be de-bulked, but now I think about it its pretty amazing. We are talking about small chunks of skin, living tissue, that have survived being mown from the back of my head with a multi bladed knife and stuffed into a coarse slit and then left to settle themselves into a bed of scar tissue for 8 years. I had in the past given some thought to simply having the poor things put out of their misery with some laser treatment. Yet, Dr Cole was fiddling around with these plugs that had seriously blighted my appearance for nearly a decade and somehow was popping them out in tact, and in a few hours they would be re installed in my head!
I’m not certain how many plugs were pulled from my left side, but things needed to be sutured up and further the sutures needed to both lift and support the wound so it wouldn’t pit or scar. This led to a long period of ‘mattress suturing’ which took in the area that had been unplugged along my hairline.
(Just to give you a time frame I think by this time I had already watched Hidalgo and was well into 50 first dates!)
One of the more immediately pleasant treats of the day was the arrival of lunch served in the chair while one of the tec’s was heroically uncompressing my Nobel Clinic plugs into something like what nature may have intended for them. WG Grinders is a local sandwich shop that does the most gorgeous “sub” cum “baguette” type of sandwich which arrived toasted and warm in foil. I had gone for the light turkey salad as a kind of comfort food, but was so impressed that they became my staple food for the rest of my stay in Atlanta (And they delivered to my hotel for $1.25!) and so I can also recommend the Italian mixed meat, the chicken and blue cheese and for the really hungry the huge meat ball with spaghetti sauce & cheese! (www.wggrinders.com)
Anyhow after lunch my better right side was prepped and basically the same steps were repeated, numbing, un-plugging and very careful suturing.
I think the over all figure of grafts rescued from the plugs on the whole was in the region of 200.
It was movie 3 by now, which I forget for now, but basically the front of my head needed to be re-anesthetised and plumped up to receive the grafts. In addition, a small area on the back of my head was shaved down for some fit extraction.
Again, the aesthesis and plumping felt a lot like someone ‘blowing up’ the skin on the back of your head, so that it has become stiff and inflexible, but it passes quickly.
Indeed I would say, one week on that this is the biggest plus of fit over strip. I had only minimal soreness on the back of my head for about a week, nothing I couldn’t sleep on from night one, if I were to compare the pain to something every day I would say the worst of my fit sites feels a bit like the sort of wound you are left with after you have squeezed a deep spot or pimple which has burst and bled a little and left you with a tiny scab and a bit of a ‘bruised’ feeling in the tissue below. And like a ‘spot wound’ I suspect that in a day or two more I am not going to be feeling anything much at all.
Anyhow, time was racing on by now and my plumped forehead was being prepared to receive the grafts which by the end of “Ghostbusters” were mostly re-implanted around the mattress stutters. Again the creation of the recipient sites is something you are aware of but don’t feel any pain from. Your skin is plumped and tight and you feel a certain sort of ‘crunching’ as the sites are made, I really don’t think anyone can feel the grafts themselves going in, it is not hard.
To be honest I’m just interested in hair transplantation technically now and I kind of have a sort of personal detachment from it, its less like “oh all this weird stuff is happening to me” and more like just an interesting thing happening to your body that will make you feel more comfortable in yourself, being performed by experts, who have a top line in pirate jokes and anecdotes on the nature of the settlement between States and the Nation, how good it that? If people can joke with you and make you laugh then they know you well enough to know what makes you tick, that is unbelievably reassuring in a situation where you are having cosmetic surgery! Unless people have got to know you how can they give you what you want or expect?
I mean, there are very few times in your life when you really get to be a part of something that is being done by the very best, so for me its kind of like getting to mow the field for to the England cricket team, you feel a bit like one of the guys just by place for them to perform their skills.
Anyhow in among the various chit chats of the day I had mentioned that I would be in Atlanta for a few days, and Dr Cole decided that, he could pop in a few more grafts to help cover the mattress sutured plug sites after they had a little time to heal. So I was told to pop back on the Wednesday for 200 fit hairs!
Wed 27th 200 fit grafts
So after a day of grinder eating and a quick trip to North Georgia outlet mall I was back. This was to be a single DVD day! The removal of the carefully applied suters & 200 fit grafts!
I have to say of the whole procedure then the removal of these things was the nearest I came to things being painful, and that was simply because stitches coming out always hurt a bit, and these things were presumably to a stitch what an origami flower are to a piece of folded paper. Again it was no big shakes and Thomas was so friendly.
Now, obviously this followed the pattern of pluming up & anesthetising and Dr Cole came in and I think harvested all of the 200 grafts himself, it was a fairly quick job too, I mean this is something that no one could do at all even 5 years ago. And now I suspect that my grafts were harvested fresh from my body in what I would guess to be around an hour (The vallium makes all my time estimates all the more approximate I’m afraid), suffice to say the time passed quickly!
Now when I was in Cyprus I was amazed by the quality of Dr Coles strip work. I didn’t notice it had gone and only just caught up with what had happened when the donor site had been stitched. As such I’m a real fan of strip for big sessions, I suspect it makes life easier for the team, it is painless and as a patent, well when its gone its gone. You don’t even have any feeling of people doing stuff at the back of your head.
But that said, even Dr Coles donor site took time to heal, it is a wound when all said and done, which meant no soccer for 2 weeks, and of course I couldn’t feel the wound for a bit as it took a while for the nerves to get better, no big deal, I would say within a month my head felt 90% normal and sometime within the following half year it felt just the same. But now with fit, my donor site feels the same after just over a week, it is shocking how un-invasive this is. I suspect I am far more of a risk to myself when I wet shave than I am having fit in the hands of Dr Cole et al.
I would also say that I have worried about fit leaving a ‘big shaved bit’ which would look kind of short compared to my other hair! Again a small problem in hindsight, the shaved area is a very small ‘strip’ area, which while shaved is growing with good vigour and I can already feel (After 9 days) that the stubble I had is already upto fuzz length. If your hair grows at around a half inch a month in 2 months no one will know unless they are a very attentive Barbour and your hair is as long as mine! So I would say go for the fit especially if you have a nice un-mangled scalp in the first place
Anyhow by the end of “Pirates”, Patrick and Dr Cole were well on the way of getting in all the grafts and I was already thinking about what to get for supper.
Although I have bored you all to death about diet, I should say one more thing. As part of my pre-opp instructions for Cyprus I took a rather liberal reading of the advice to stay of vitamins. I eat a lot of health food and tend to think of stuff like fish oil, sea kelp or yeast, as food rather than a vitamin per say. As such I bled very freely and must have been a right pain for everyone, I have no idea why they would invite me back at all really!
Anyhow, determined not to make unnecessary work this time, I was determined to apply the no vits advice to my whole diet. The reason vitamins are discouraged after all is that they thin the blood, so all my favourite foods, such as olive oil, garlic by the clove load, curry spices were all binned for two weeks as I lead my new less oozy lifestyle. Indeed I got to see this work as a kind of before and after as as soon as I got into my hotel in Atlanta I brilliantly sliced my finger open with a steak knife trying to get in a bag of oatmeal and was amazed to see a fairly deep cut actually stop bleeding rather than dribbling on for hours like normal! And wouldn’t you know it, in the interests of science and after 2 days of my normal food I cut my hand throwing a ball for my dog and it had a good long dribble, despite being a smaller wound than my Atlanta cut.
I would also say that unlike Cyprus, where presumably more of my viscose blood fled from my scalp, in Atlanta my head is totally normal after only 7 days (See Pic 1 &2). I remember the recovery being quick before, and I have a good fringe if I need it, but this is amazing. It is not often you can talk about a ht result in only a week but in a way that’s how I feel as for the first time in 8 years I really can comb my hair back and not fear any attention on my hairline. I really was a bit resigned to the fact that I would have to put up with looking a bit sparse for 6 months until the new stuff grew in with the plugs being absent, but that’s not how it is at all. The fact that my hair no longer has to be combed forward means that I can have more thickness further back if I want it, or not and it is only going to look better, this is really a great job. My only visible scar is the one from my hapless attempt to feed myself after a long haul flight!
So once again, thank you to Dr Cole and everyone I had the pleasure of meeting, you were all so kind its just shocking! I am forever grateful!!!!!
Your un-nobled friend
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