Hair update!!!

I love being a nurse.

One of the many reasons is because whenever I have some sort of weird medical issue, I can just talk to one of the several doctors I work with and get some quality free medical advice.

So, when one of my favorite dermatologists saw my blog entry about my hair loss, he gave me a brief consult…through faceboook. Awesome.

This is what he said. It seemed to calm me, so for all you post-ops out there who were as scared as I was about the hair loss, read on.

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Hi Kristen,

I hope you're well! You don't know this but I have an RSS subscription to your blog and I read it all the time. It's truly fantastic--you have a talent. And it's wonderful to see how great you've been doing!

I read your post about hair loss, and you don't need to be concerned. Beyond nutrition, your hair loss is at the time that is classic for something called telogen effluvium-- a sudden loss of hair that occurs at three months out of a physically or emotionally (or in your case both) event.

To get nerdy about it, hair goes through 4 different stages. The longest stage is anagen, where your hair hangs out for years. Right before it falls out, it turns into a stage called telogen. Normally about 10-15% of your hair is telogen at any given time.

People who go through the stresses I mentioned have their hair covert from anagen phase to telogen in large amounts. 3 months after you convert to telogen hair starts falling out, which is what you're noticing now. It's not pathologic, just a premature aging of the hair.

Your hair will come back, but sometimes it takes up to 3 months for the telogen effluvium (the falling out of all the telogen hairs) to occur, then 3-6 months afterwards for people to feel that they have their whole hair density back. Usually you forget about it after a while and nobody other than you notices that your hair is thin.

There's nothing much that you can do to change this so don't waste your money on anything expensive. If you're concerned, volumizing shampoos change the electric charges on the hair to make them repel one another and seem larger, but based on the pictures of yours that I've seen you don't need it.

So relax, forget about it, and find something else to worry about.

You look wonderful.

-A

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Like I said, I love this guy. He is a fantastic doctor, but more importantly he is a wonderful friend.

Does my hair still come out in clumps? Sure. But now that I know there is really no “cure” for this, I’ve decided to save my money and just chill out about the whole thing.

Thanks, A!!!! : )