The Day I Went Bald

By Jack Brummet, Hair, Fur, and Feather Ed.

Photoshop simulation of a balding Jack

It started one day—or, rather, I noticed it one day—right after I received a really bad haircut...you know, a haircut so bad that you fix it yourself with whatever crude scissors are around. So, I left the barbershop, went home and looked in the mirror. Most of my left eyebrow was gone! Just a few scraggly hairs remained. . .up to then, I had thick eyebrows. All of a sudden—pffffft! I was really steamed at that barber, but there was no way I was going to let him touch up my hair, and the eyebrow would just have to grow back. How did he butcher my eyebrow?  Well, he did take a "smoke break" in the middle of the cut, and it wasn't cigarettes, I'm pretty sure.  But that's a sidebar. 

A week or so later, Keelin said "Turn around, Johnnie. What's that on the back of your head?" I turned around and she pulled aside some tendrils of hair. Gleaming in the light was a 

GIGANTIC 

bald spot!! It was about the size of a softball. And it happened literally overnight! I was going bald!!!!! I spent about five hours a day looking at that spot in the mirror. I could feel the wind on it. It always felt cold. And I was sure everyone was always staring at it. It wasn't in the center, but off to the left side. It just flat looked weird. Naturally, I obsessed about it night and day. I found out from some fellow sufferers that I was experiencing Alopecia Areata [1].  It happens more often than you might think.  I've probably met at least ten people who have experienced it once, and a handful that suffer it fairly regularly. 

It could stay like this. Alopecia! The bald spots usually happened in twos and threes! Two more could sprout up! It could all grow back. It could also cause every single hair on my body, including my eyelashes and nose cilia, to disappear. I would look like a Grey! No one really knows much about Alopecia and there aren't any real treatments. My doctor said it was no big deal. She could refer me to someone. . .but they didn't really have any way to treat it. I wondered if she would have been so cavalier if I had been a woman?

I ranted and raved. My entire being was now focused on those few inches of bald real estate on the back of my head. I checked the spot dozens of times a day, My bald friends were fascinated and highly amused. A couple of months later, I was performing my obsessive scalp observations, and discovered it had now sprouted peach fuzz! Woohoo! All hail the mighty stem cell [see footnote 1]. Within a month, my skull had reforested itself. The eyebrow came back too; not so bushy as it once was. The hair coming back in my eyebrow was white! I dyed it a couple of times. And then my second growth eyebrow slowly darkened, and matched my other eyebrow.

There is nothing that says it won't come back with a vengeance. In fact, Keelin told me yesterday I was tempting fate by just writing about it.

Quite a few years later, there have been no further rogue white blood cell attacks. Excelsior!

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 [1] In alopecia areata, your immune system/white blood cells attack the growing cells in the hair follicles. They start thinking your hair is some sort of infection! The affected follicles become small and drastically slow down production. Thank the Lord that the stem cells that continually supply the follicle with new cells do not seem to be targeted and the follicles COULD regrow. But the hair may also fall out again. No one really knows how or why. Some people lose just a few patches of hair, then the hair regrows, and the condition never recurs. Other people continue to lose and regrow hair for many years. A few lose all the hair on their head; some lose all the hair on their head, face, and body.

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