About

I've always had a relatively big/prominent forehead and have experienced male pattern baldness to about a Norwood III, which only serves to make matters worse. At about 30 years old I started propecia to help stabilize the hairloss and now at 35 this mostly seems to have worked. Recently i've also added rogaine to the regimen to see if that would improve the frontal thickenss at all. While the rogaine might have done a little bit, it's become clear to me that I would need a hair transplant to achieve the results I desire in terms of adding some density to the front and filling in the corners.


My Surgical Treatments to Date

Just underwent my 1st hair transplant procedure with Dr. True of True & Dorin.

~2100 grafts (don't have exact hair count but Dr. True said I averaged >2 hairs per graft so 4000+ hairs) to the frontal and temporal regions.

My Non Surgical Treatments

Propecia, Rogaine

Bald Class

Bald class 3A

Norwood class 3A

The Norwood Class A patterns are characterized by a predominantly front to back progression of hair loss. These patterns lack the connecting bridge across the top of the scalp and generally have more limited hair loss in the crown, even when advanced.

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My Latest journal entries

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Month 7 Well after getting busy with work and the holidays I wanted to update my blog and share my general thoughts on the whole procedure.All in all I've had a pretty easy time with it. I didn't find it particularly painful, recovery went relatively quick, and I was able to be pretty discreet through the whole thing by growing my hair a bit longer in the front (except for a couple friends I told, no one knows about it).So what do I think at 7 months. Pretty good! I wouldn't say it's perfect - my right side had a bit more loss and is still a bit thin that will likely require a second pass to really fill in. However, I'm quite happy with the left side which has less loss and so far has filled in and squared off nicely. Already giving a noticeable cosmetic improvement in pictures etc. I found myself a good barber who I told about the procedure and he does a good job with cutting/styling. He's seen it from month 3 through now and thinks its really filling in nicely.The scar has healed quite well. A slight line in the back from the missing hair is barely noticeable when my barber cuts my hair down in the back, but within a few days it quickly fades. Could just leave it a little longer back there, but it's really barely noticeable. 

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Month 4 Yesterday was officially 4 months since my procedure and I'm happy to be in the growing stage. Still pretty fine hair, but it's coming up quickly compared to where I was at month 3. Hopefully it continues. The scar is seeing quite a bit of improvement - so happy about that. 

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Month 2 So Tuesday was Month 2. Not really much to report. Maybe some very slight growth of grafts near hairline, but most are still dormant. Seems like some of the grafts that didn't fall out are continuing to grow and perhaps a few hairs that were shocked out from procedure are starting to come back. Donor area is healing with a little bit of thinness in a small patch on the right side over the scar. Seems to be a little bit of shockloss that should be back in several months. Not too noticeable as long as i keep some length to my hair. The waiting continues.

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Month 1 Today I am exactly one month post surgery. It hasn't been too traumatic and things seem to be healing nicely. Admittedly, I've been a bit obsessive about my hair for years (especially when it started receding) so I do have to try and keep myself away from the mirror.  I did get a little hair cut (just a scissors trim up) at around day 16. I've been used to keeping the hair a bit shorter - I guess guys with receding and fine calibur hair can understand it seems a bit more manageable and the thinning a little less obvious when kept neatly trimmed at a shorter length - but i've been leaving it longer to cover the scar and recipient area while things heal. Thinking I might go for a number 5 guard and cut the top a bit shorter in the next couple weeks to keep things a bit more manageable up top. The patiently waiting process continues....

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Day 14 It's now been 2 weeks since I've had the FUT procedure. I've been back at work since Monday and it seems to have gone completely undetected. Aside from some pinkness at the temple points all the other residual pinkess is hidden by my hair and it has subsided substantially. It's not 100%, but I would say it's 75% of the way there (the immediate front seems to be healed slightly faster and less pink than the frontal sides, which could reflect the greater number of grafts being place in those areas?). My back and side hair is longer than I've had it in awhile and it grows fairly dense so the scar is completely hidden when the hair is dry.  At this time, the majority of the grafts have fallen out, which is right on target with the True & Dorin instructions stating that those grafts should disappear within 2-3 weeks. I do feel the frontal forelock area may be a little thinner from some increased shedding in the past couple weeks after the procedure, but not substantially so that anyone aside from myself would notice. Fortunatley the shedding seems to have slowed down - so lets see what the next two weeks brings. My hair is also quite a bit longer on top than I ever keep it so it's a bit hard to tell for sure if i've truly lost more than normal native hair. I'd sort of like to clean it up with a small haircut soon, but am being cautious until things heal. Nice to have that extra hair to brush over any pink spots or randomly growing grafts as well as keeping the scar well hidden ;) I'm back to my regular shampoo/conditioner routine in the morning and gradually building back up on my exercise routine - went for a short run outside yesterday after the sun went down. 

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Surgery!! Day 0 Well I didn't sleep too great last night as I was pretty anxious for surgery. After going through the procedure I can say I had a painless experience - moments of mild discomfort at worst. Perhaps I have a higher pain tolerance than some others on the blogs, but I found the shots for anesthesia to be only mildy uncomfortable, and many of the shots you could hardly feel. Furthermore, any discomfort only lasted for a second. Harvesting the donor scalp (FUT) was slightly odd as you could kind of hear the cutting, pruning, trimming etc. If you really dwelled on what was going on back there it could be a little disconcerting - Valium helps with relaxation/anxiety - but again no pain.  Anesthesia to the recipient sites was again nothing more than mild discomfort. All in all the toughest part of the procedure for me was having to sit still while the team placed the donor grafts into their recipient sites. It's tough to not move your head/neck for an hour! Fortunately, the whole True & Dorin team was very nice and constantly checking my comfort status, allowing bathroom breaks, neck adjustments to get comfortable and trying to get me to eat my lunch - even though I thought let's just get these grafts placed! And as with my consultation visit I found Dr.True to be a very warm and caring person. He and the whole team go to great lengths to make sure you're calm and comfortable - even covering me with a blanket during the donor harvesting as I wore shorts to the procedure and it was quite chilly in the office. While my hair is thin in the frontal region, Dr. True informed me it is fairly dense in the back and sides and they were able to easily harvest about 2100 grafts, with an average of slightly more than 2 hairs per graft. And the sutures are completely concealed. I've been growing my hair out the last 6-8 weeks to allow for some camouflage ;) I'm now 6 hours out and have only mild tightness around the suture sites and the recipient area feels a little numb. I'm not crazy about narcotic pain medicine as it tends to nauseate me so i'm just taking extra strength tylenol before bed and that seems completely adequate for the mild discomfort in the donor area. Now for some healing and hopefully some growing...!!!

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Day 7 Well so far it's been suprisingly pain free. The only thing that has been slightly annoying is sleeping - since I'm a bit of a toss/turn kind of guy i've been using the neck pillow for the first 7 days to avoid any potential rubbing of the grafts on the pillow.  All in all things have been coming along pretty nicely. The thing that is a little disconcerting is what appears to be an increased in shedding of the native hairs when running a comb through. This is said to be pretty normal, but hopefully it doesn't become too great. Propecia is (and has been) part of my MPB cessation program and I am restarting Minoxidil today (day 7 per the True & Dorin protocol). Hopefully this helps any major "shock loss" issues. It has been nice to have the little vacation from work to let things heal, though I'm getting kind of bored and will be back in the office day 11 post transplant. I think it should be healed up/discreet enough for those of you worried about that - especially with the hair grown out to cover most of the pinkness. Maybe i'll have a little sunburn/dermatitis left over from my vacation ;)

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Dr.MoreHair
Bald class: 3A
Procedure 1

Pre Hair Transplant Day1 Some photos to document my hair adventure. As you can see I have pretty significant recession in the frontal corners and the hair line has receded a couple of centimeters. I'm really just looking to try and frame my face a little better, as I've always had a big forehead and now with the recession I really don't like all the scalp I see in pictures. Thus, the plan is to add grafts to the frontal corners and bring down the front just a little bit to be more in line with where my natural mature hairline should be. We'll also add to the temple peaks to try and establish an actual hairline - as you can seen it's not well defined these days. For the procedure I decided to go with Dr. True of True & Dorin. Doing a lot of research (much of it on these forums) I really felt that Dr. True has an artistic touch for creating very natural looking hairline. In my case, being less advanced on the Norwood scale, I didn't really need nor want the huge mega session that other surgeons are routinely performing. Let's save some of those grafts for the future - never know when you may need them!  Obviously, as one of the premier HT surgeons, he needs no introductions on this forum, but I'll reiterate what others have said - Dr. True is a warm, caring and honest man. There were no sales pitches, no overselling or promises of great hair for a lifetime, just an honest and thoughtful opinion of what he believes he could do for my personal situation.