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Hey I have some questions about my upcoming repair surgery. While attempting to write this post it kind of turned into this blown out piece about the last year and the changes in my life following a bad FUT procedure last August. I really would like some input. I listed questions below which are and numbered in the center of this post – if you just want to scroll down and read those, that is fine. I will totally not be offended. Like I stated before, I did not intend for this to be 4,000 words or so on my life following a bad transplant but it is kind of what it turned into. Although it may be somewhat wordy, unnecessary and kind of preachy it was also kind of cathartic. I haven’t really opened up to anyone in the year and change following my bad transplant so in a way this felt very comforting. But ultimately, I really wanted some feedback about Dr. Cole as well as Fue plug removal, scarring and treatment on the skin underneath.
“Yesterday I went for a swim. First light. I went out past the surf lines, further than I had ever dared as a kid. Keep going, I thought. Keep going until you can’t turn back, that’s where there isn’t any choice. And you don’t know where that is…you can’t know until you pass it…and then it’s too late.” ~ Boardwalk Empire Eldorado
Life is full of irony. Sometimes poetic. Sometimes earned. Sometimes unfair. Sometimes just a series of intersecting circumstances unfolding out of anyone’s control. For me, as I stand under the harsh bathroom lighting and look at myself in the mirror there is a feeling of mixed irony, that is kind of all of the above. I am suffering from a bad hair transplant. A botch job as they say. And there is a lot of blame to go around. The doctor and the technicians putting in the grafts, they are easy scape goats. It’s their fault, they did this to me, and they’re the ones to blame. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe some of this was just chance, poor healing and reactions that can happen even when the doctor and his staff are 100 percent thorough on their end. Like Andy Dufresne once said. “Bad luck. It has to land on somebody.” Maybe that fictional character from Shawshank is right. Maybe it was just bad luck, maybe it was just my time. But honestly, I know better than that. And the answer on who is to blame isn’t something so binary. It’s not black or white. It’s not A or B. It more complicated. Ironically the person to blame the most is the one starring back at me in the mirror. This is on me. I had always been semi neurotic about my hair, call it a blend of insecurity mixed with neurosis, topped with narcissism. Anyone who plays god with their hair line can kind of relate. I put myself down this path when I carelessly got a transplant in my early twenties. And although, I thought I was doing the right thing with the right doctor, I doubled down on that carelessness a year ago. So now here I am. Just another guy, on another forum, wishing he could turn back the hands of time so he didn’t feel like just another statistic, just another notch on the bedpost for botchjobs. And the most ironic thing of all is I would give anything just to go back to where I was before I got the surgery. I would give ANYTHING to have the hair I thought I couldn’t live with just a year and a half ago. Because losing your hair is one thing but being trapped under the umbrella of a bad transplant is entirely another. Its apples and bowling balls. And the worst part is, you have to live with it, you have to own it. Life only moves one way, forward…there is no going back.
So down to brass tacks. I don’t want to harp too much on this particular subject. I am here like most people on these forums for help and information from people with far more knowledge and credibility on the matters of hair transplants and repair surgery than I will ever be. You guys will forget more than I will ever hope to know and for that I am grateful. And in a demonstration of my gratitude I have some important questions. Lol. Questions that I hope to get vetted. But before I dive into that, I figure I should go over just a little bit of back story about what exactly I have been going through this past year.
I had an FUT procedure done 14 months ago. 1000 grafts in the front and temples on my hairline. I started noticing how much trouble I was in once the grafts starting growing around 8 months post-surgery. For one, my hairline was done too low. There is a vast difference to the grafts in the front in context to the ones behind it and to my natural hair. I call this hair “The Wall”. I have call this the wall because that is what it essentially is – a wall of pluggy and coarse like hair that coats around my hairline unmanageably. Imagine wiry, ugly, doll like hair coating over the rest of your hair in almost a Venus fly trap motion in how it grows. Not only does it look objectively awful, it is nearly impossible for me to style or cut my hair in any fashion. And trust me I have tried every haircut imaginable that you can attempt with an ugly strip scar in the back of your head. It has been devastating on almost every level because not only does it look bad, I can’t style it in any feasible way and I also have a nasty strip scar in the back which doesn’t allow me to get a proper haircut. I am boxed in on almost every level. It’s funny (or kind of just deeply sickening) that I have never had MORE HAIR in my entire life and I HAVE NEVER EVER EVER looked worse. How’s that for irony. I wake up every day and look in the mirror at this great head of hair that I can’t utilize or get to because of this wall of awful grafts in the front. I have a lot of great hair on my head. A LOT. It is just undercut from this past surgery. I guess I didn’t appreciate just what I had until it was gone. I sound like a bad pop song, but the shoe fits as they say. And that is something I am going to have to learn to live with. I visited my doctor who performed the surgery 3 times and had an open correspondence through email over the past 6 months. I expressed concerns about the surgery, about how the transplants were affecting my hair now that they were growing in, how the right side of my temple hurt and how my hair ultimate looked. The doctor not only assured me that surgery was fine, that my skin underneath was fine, and that the transplant was a massive success. “I look great” were his words exactly. And his words still cut like a knife because maybe in his eyes the surgery was a success. Yes, I have a lot of hair. Because I didn’t feel great. I felt damaged, scarred and diminished. And I was starting to feel like maybe I was wrong, maybe I was too deep in the forest to see the trees, maybe I was going crazy. That is until I saw two other hair transplant surgeons and got their unbiased opinion.
Time for the meat and potatoes portion of this post, and I appreciate you guys bearing with me while I try and put my words together. Writing about this subject has been very difficult for me but also kind of therapeutic in a way, so at least there’s that. I put together a short list from doing some online research about repair surgery and graft removal. From my research online I found a Dr. Cole in Atlanta and a Dr. Cooley in North Carolina. I flew out over a week ago from NJ and consulted with each. My consult with Dr. Cole started off a little shaky, mainly because I was. I was a nervous wreck. Kevin from A Christmas Story nervous wreck, like when he was meeting Santa at the mall and trying to convey how much he really wanted red ryder bb gun but was so nervous by the severity of the moment that he choked. Santa ended up telling him he wanted a football and he left with a foot in the face. That was basically me. When Dr. Cole walked in the room and asked what I was unhappy with, I was having a full blown panic attack. My heart was racy and I was stammering my words. You have to understand I had over 6 long months of borderline obsessing about my hair and what was happening to it, researching possible solutions to a bleak and almost solution-less scenario, as well as having the only doctor I consulted about this tell me everything was fine. So this consultation was a big deal to me. It was like the super bowl of deals to me and of course I was choking in the moment. I was waiting for Dr. Cole to stop me mid-sentence, tell me how “great” I looked and send me back on my way. Thankfully that was not the case!
One of the first things Dr. Cole said to me was…”Who did this you?” He had a look of blank sincerity mixed with seriousness that was as damning as it was comforting. I had known I was fuked (for lack of a better word). The reality was a total kick in the gut, but it was also somewhat comforting. It meant that I wasn’t crazy!
The long and the short of his analysis was that my hairline was placed too low, and too straight, the type of grafts used in many places especially on the right portion of my hairline were the wrong kind and likely placed with instruments too big. He was concerned about my skin underneath. I have some ridging and some scarring at the far end of my right temple. (Hence the reason I had some scalp pain that my previous doctor said was nothing to worry about) He attributed this some to the surgery and the tools used during surgery but also to the amount of grafts put in. His comparison was that of a glass of water. When you put a rock in a glass of water what happens to the water? The water level is raised. In many ways that is what is happening with my head. He said the amount of grafts put have caused a similar kind of reaction on my scalp and getting some removed would help alleviate not only the discomfort but some of the ridging. He recommended FUE removal of the grafts in the front to help thin out the wall, which he said he could get off of my head nearly scar free. Obviously there is some semblance of a white dotting, but as he described it, when it is done on the forehead or front of the hairline it is much less detectable than FUE scarring on other areas of the head. So all in all we are looking at FUEing off as many as we can in the front, maybe around 100. Possible plug redistribution on the temple areas of my scalp depending on how my skin is reacting as well as filling in the scar in the back which would take roughly around 300 to 400 grafts. He also said he would not be opposed to going slow. Since I was burned bad in the past, and wanted to remove say only a few plugs the first time and see for myself how the healing would take. My main trepidation to him was the scarring that results from graft removal and how everything I have researched at the time, had come up with a list of hair transplants doctors in the field recommending against it.
I went from Atlanta to Charlotte and met with Dr. Cooley. My confidence was a little more intact this time, so I wasn’t a stammering mess like I was when I met with Dr. Cole. I actually spoke confidently and articulately if I can so say myself. From doing research about Cooley I know he specializes in electrolysis when it comes to hair repair surgery. I was private messaging with someone on this forum who had recently had a bad FUT transplant and went to Cooley for repair, where Cooley used electrolysis to remove a number of grafts implanted too low on the front of his hairline. So be that as it may, I was surprised to hear when Cooley did not recommended electrolysis for my condition. His recommendation was more of the same. He said where I am at my repair surgery could go one of 2 ways. One, completly removing the transplanted grafts in the front by cutting them out. He said this would be the only way to remove the wall of bad grafts completely. Although that might fix one set of problems for me, it would also result in creating a new set of more. The scaring in the front would be really drastic and even Cooley mentioned this approach would probably be way too aggressive right now. The second approach would be to FUE off as many as we could. Although if the grafts in the front are like a wall of bad hair this wouldn’t 100 percent resolve the problem because in essence you are only taking a few bricks out and now breaking down the wall so to speak, but he recommended around 100 grafts removed around the front and temples of my hairline along with filling in the back of my scar which would roughly take around 300 to 500 grafts. He agreed with Cole about the scaring and said a skilled surgeon can get them out of the front of my head without real noticeable scars, especially since I have a lot of hair on my head still, which could help camouflage that sort of thing unless someone is extremely close up to my head and scalp and distinctly looking for them. This is all good news of course, the bad news was that he was concerned with the skin underneath some of my grafts. He said the ridging isn’t so much from amount of grafts put in on my head – hence the rock in a cup of water analogy Cole used, but more of just scar tissue from the surgery itself. He strongly and I repeat strongly recommended A Cell treatment which is supposed to help improve the blood flow to the skin underneath which could help with pigment issues as well as overall healing in those areas. Now I am not only scared to death about the white dot scarring that will happen when I FUE these awful grafts off, but of what my skin will look like once they are gone. Granted it is only in the front of my hairline, but if you have ever googled plug removal and looked at photos on the internet it is quite damning. I mean the pinning and the pigment alone in some of those photos almost made me contemplate if I should just shave it all off and don a hair piece. Obviously that is not going to happen, but these things have got to come off one way or another and before I do so I hope to get some feedback.
After seeing both doctors and getting their independent opinions and both Dr. Cole and Cooley coming up with the same result it is safe to say that I know which direction to take. So these are my questions…
“Yesterday I went for a swim. First light. I went out past the surf lines, further than I had ever dared as a kid. Keep going, I thought. Keep going until you can’t turn back, that’s where there isn’t any choice. And you don’t know where that is…you can’t know until you pass it…and then it’s too late.” ~ Boardwalk Empire Eldorado
Life is full of irony. Sometimes poetic. Sometimes earned. Sometimes unfair. Sometimes just a series of intersecting circumstances unfolding out of anyone’s control. For me, as I stand under the harsh bathroom lighting and look at myself in the mirror there is a feeling of mixed irony, that is kind of all of the above. I am suffering from a bad hair transplant. A botch job as they say. And there is a lot of blame to go around. The doctor and the technicians putting in the grafts, they are easy scape goats. It’s their fault, they did this to me, and they’re the ones to blame. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe some of this was just chance, poor healing and reactions that can happen even when the doctor and his staff are 100 percent thorough on their end. Like Andy Dufresne once said. “Bad luck. It has to land on somebody.” Maybe that fictional character from Shawshank is right. Maybe it was just bad luck, maybe it was just my time. But honestly, I know better than that. And the answer on who is to blame isn’t something so binary. It’s not black or white. It’s not A or B. It more complicated. Ironically the person to blame the most is the one starring back at me in the mirror. This is on me. I had always been semi neurotic about my hair, call it a blend of insecurity mixed with neurosis, topped with narcissism. Anyone who plays god with their hair line can kind of relate. I put myself down this path when I carelessly got a transplant in my early twenties. And although, I thought I was doing the right thing with the right doctor, I doubled down on that carelessness a year ago. So now here I am. Just another guy, on another forum, wishing he could turn back the hands of time so he didn’t feel like just another statistic, just another notch on the bedpost for botchjobs. And the most ironic thing of all is I would give anything just to go back to where I was before I got the surgery. I would give ANYTHING to have the hair I thought I couldn’t live with just a year and a half ago. Because losing your hair is one thing but being trapped under the umbrella of a bad transplant is entirely another. Its apples and bowling balls. And the worst part is, you have to live with it, you have to own it. Life only moves one way, forward…there is no going back.
So down to brass tacks. I don’t want to harp too much on this particular subject. I am here like most people on these forums for help and information from people with far more knowledge and credibility on the matters of hair transplants and repair surgery than I will ever be. You guys will forget more than I will ever hope to know and for that I am grateful. And in a demonstration of my gratitude I have some important questions. Lol. Questions that I hope to get vetted. But before I dive into that, I figure I should go over just a little bit of back story about what exactly I have been going through this past year.
I had an FUT procedure done 14 months ago. 1000 grafts in the front and temples on my hairline. I started noticing how much trouble I was in once the grafts starting growing around 8 months post-surgery. For one, my hairline was done too low. There is a vast difference to the grafts in the front in context to the ones behind it and to my natural hair. I call this hair “The Wall”. I have call this the wall because that is what it essentially is – a wall of pluggy and coarse like hair that coats around my hairline unmanageably. Imagine wiry, ugly, doll like hair coating over the rest of your hair in almost a Venus fly trap motion in how it grows. Not only does it look objectively awful, it is nearly impossible for me to style or cut my hair in any fashion. And trust me I have tried every haircut imaginable that you can attempt with an ugly strip scar in the back of your head. It has been devastating on almost every level because not only does it look bad, I can’t style it in any feasible way and I also have a nasty strip scar in the back which doesn’t allow me to get a proper haircut. I am boxed in on almost every level. It’s funny (or kind of just deeply sickening) that I have never had MORE HAIR in my entire life and I HAVE NEVER EVER EVER looked worse. How’s that for irony. I wake up every day and look in the mirror at this great head of hair that I can’t utilize or get to because of this wall of awful grafts in the front. I have a lot of great hair on my head. A LOT. It is just undercut from this past surgery. I guess I didn’t appreciate just what I had until it was gone. I sound like a bad pop song, but the shoe fits as they say. And that is something I am going to have to learn to live with. I visited my doctor who performed the surgery 3 times and had an open correspondence through email over the past 6 months. I expressed concerns about the surgery, about how the transplants were affecting my hair now that they were growing in, how the right side of my temple hurt and how my hair ultimate looked. The doctor not only assured me that surgery was fine, that my skin underneath was fine, and that the transplant was a massive success. “I look great” were his words exactly. And his words still cut like a knife because maybe in his eyes the surgery was a success. Yes, I have a lot of hair. Because I didn’t feel great. I felt damaged, scarred and diminished. And I was starting to feel like maybe I was wrong, maybe I was too deep in the forest to see the trees, maybe I was going crazy. That is until I saw two other hair transplant surgeons and got their unbiased opinion.
Time for the meat and potatoes portion of this post, and I appreciate you guys bearing with me while I try and put my words together. Writing about this subject has been very difficult for me but also kind of therapeutic in a way, so at least there’s that. I put together a short list from doing some online research about repair surgery and graft removal. From my research online I found a Dr. Cole in Atlanta and a Dr. Cooley in North Carolina. I flew out over a week ago from NJ and consulted with each. My consult with Dr. Cole started off a little shaky, mainly because I was. I was a nervous wreck. Kevin from A Christmas Story nervous wreck, like when he was meeting Santa at the mall and trying to convey how much he really wanted red ryder bb gun but was so nervous by the severity of the moment that he choked. Santa ended up telling him he wanted a football and he left with a foot in the face. That was basically me. When Dr. Cole walked in the room and asked what I was unhappy with, I was having a full blown panic attack. My heart was racy and I was stammering my words. You have to understand I had over 6 long months of borderline obsessing about my hair and what was happening to it, researching possible solutions to a bleak and almost solution-less scenario, as well as having the only doctor I consulted about this tell me everything was fine. So this consultation was a big deal to me. It was like the super bowl of deals to me and of course I was choking in the moment. I was waiting for Dr. Cole to stop me mid-sentence, tell me how “great” I looked and send me back on my way. Thankfully that was not the case!
One of the first things Dr. Cole said to me was…”Who did this you?” He had a look of blank sincerity mixed with seriousness that was as damning as it was comforting. I had known I was fuked (for lack of a better word). The reality was a total kick in the gut, but it was also somewhat comforting. It meant that I wasn’t crazy!
The long and the short of his analysis was that my hairline was placed too low, and too straight, the type of grafts used in many places especially on the right portion of my hairline were the wrong kind and likely placed with instruments too big. He was concerned about my skin underneath. I have some ridging and some scarring at the far end of my right temple. (Hence the reason I had some scalp pain that my previous doctor said was nothing to worry about) He attributed this some to the surgery and the tools used during surgery but also to the amount of grafts put in. His comparison was that of a glass of water. When you put a rock in a glass of water what happens to the water? The water level is raised. In many ways that is what is happening with my head. He said the amount of grafts put have caused a similar kind of reaction on my scalp and getting some removed would help alleviate not only the discomfort but some of the ridging. He recommended FUE removal of the grafts in the front to help thin out the wall, which he said he could get off of my head nearly scar free. Obviously there is some semblance of a white dotting, but as he described it, when it is done on the forehead or front of the hairline it is much less detectable than FUE scarring on other areas of the head. So all in all we are looking at FUEing off as many as we can in the front, maybe around 100. Possible plug redistribution on the temple areas of my scalp depending on how my skin is reacting as well as filling in the scar in the back which would take roughly around 300 to 400 grafts. He also said he would not be opposed to going slow. Since I was burned bad in the past, and wanted to remove say only a few plugs the first time and see for myself how the healing would take. My main trepidation to him was the scarring that results from graft removal and how everything I have researched at the time, had come up with a list of hair transplants doctors in the field recommending against it.
I went from Atlanta to Charlotte and met with Dr. Cooley. My confidence was a little more intact this time, so I wasn’t a stammering mess like I was when I met with Dr. Cole. I actually spoke confidently and articulately if I can so say myself. From doing research about Cooley I know he specializes in electrolysis when it comes to hair repair surgery. I was private messaging with someone on this forum who had recently had a bad FUT transplant and went to Cooley for repair, where Cooley used electrolysis to remove a number of grafts implanted too low on the front of his hairline. So be that as it may, I was surprised to hear when Cooley did not recommended electrolysis for my condition. His recommendation was more of the same. He said where I am at my repair surgery could go one of 2 ways. One, completly removing the transplanted grafts in the front by cutting them out. He said this would be the only way to remove the wall of bad grafts completely. Although that might fix one set of problems for me, it would also result in creating a new set of more. The scaring in the front would be really drastic and even Cooley mentioned this approach would probably be way too aggressive right now. The second approach would be to FUE off as many as we could. Although if the grafts in the front are like a wall of bad hair this wouldn’t 100 percent resolve the problem because in essence you are only taking a few bricks out and now breaking down the wall so to speak, but he recommended around 100 grafts removed around the front and temples of my hairline along with filling in the back of my scar which would roughly take around 300 to 500 grafts. He agreed with Cole about the scaring and said a skilled surgeon can get them out of the front of my head without real noticeable scars, especially since I have a lot of hair on my head still, which could help camouflage that sort of thing unless someone is extremely close up to my head and scalp and distinctly looking for them. This is all good news of course, the bad news was that he was concerned with the skin underneath some of my grafts. He said the ridging isn’t so much from amount of grafts put in on my head – hence the rock in a cup of water analogy Cole used, but more of just scar tissue from the surgery itself. He strongly and I repeat strongly recommended A Cell treatment which is supposed to help improve the blood flow to the skin underneath which could help with pigment issues as well as overall healing in those areas. Now I am not only scared to death about the white dot scarring that will happen when I FUE these awful grafts off, but of what my skin will look like once they are gone. Granted it is only in the front of my hairline, but if you have ever googled plug removal and looked at photos on the internet it is quite damning. I mean the pinning and the pigment alone in some of those photos almost made me contemplate if I should just shave it all off and don a hair piece. Obviously that is not going to happen, but these things have got to come off one way or another and before I do so I hope to get some feedback.
After seeing both doctors and getting their independent opinions and both Dr. Cole and Cooley coming up with the same result it is safe to say that I know which direction to take. So these are my questions…