Hair loss

Hello! I hope everyone is having a great day. This morning, I felt the ends of my hair and remembered another traumatizing symptom of Lupus. Hair loss. The ends of my hair are super thin because between January to April this year, I slowly lost about half of my hair. One day, I noticed there was an awful lot of hair in the shower drain. Next thing I know, my hair brushes are full of hair and have to be cleaned out daily. Prior to this, I’d only thin a little bit on one side of my head or the other, and while I could feel the difference, it wasn’t a big deal. My hair is thin but I have a LOT of it which keeps salons on their toes. They’ll book an up-do for an hour and realize it’s gonna take a it longer than that because holy cow there’s more than meets the eye, with my hair.  

Watching your hair fall out is freaking terrifying. I put on a strong face in front of people, but I was mortified at the thought of possibly going bald. I had may break downs bawling to my husband about looking ugly with a big bald head. I was lucky though, because my hair was coming out all over my head instead of in patches so I could keep my hair pulled back to cover it up and no one could tell. Thanks to lots of hairspray and volumizer most of the time people didn‘t notice how much hair I was missing when it was down. I tried to figure out what was going on, so I stopped taking certain medications to see if that was the cause. It wasn’t the DHEA or the Arava (DMARD), it was the disease activity.

I wanted to take some sort of control of the situation so I made a “Bald lady goal list” just incase. If I was going to lose my hair, I was going to have fun with it. So, here’s what I was going to do, and what I will do if it happens.

I wanted/will possibly:

First, go to the Children’s Hospital and have the children decorate me head. They could use marker, paint, glitter, stickers, whatever they want to have fun and get their minds off of what they’re gong through.

Then, get a tattoo on the back of my head saying, “Bald Bitch” with a purple butterfly underneath that, and under the butterfly would be “Lupus Fighter”.
I’d get fun wigs to play with, perhaps a purple Mohawk for special occasions.

Have some Glamour photos taken, bald.

Karaoke Shinade O’Connor’s, “Nothing Compares”. 

The bald possibilities are endless. J

Fortunately, this bout of hair loss didn’t necessitate shaving my head because I didn’t lose enough hair to resemble Golem or require a comb over, but that doesn’t mean that won’t ever happen. My hair was so thin before it stopped falling out, I could use infant hair ties to hold up a ponytail. 
Now, I have what didn’t fall out and a bunch of hair between one to three inches long all over my head. When my hair first started to grow back, I’d get tiny little hairs that stood up all over my head like I was constantly standing in high winds or stuck my fingers in the electrical socket. Because of this, for a while I didn’t just keep my hair up, I used copious amounts of hair spray to keep my billions of tiny little fly aways glued to my head. Now, I have a lot of those one to three inch hairs that curl at my face or under my ponytail because they’re too short to fit in the hair tie. I love those hairs because it’s proof my hair is coming back and it feels so good to see that the loss isn’t permanent. Will it happen again. Probably. But I’m totally ready to rock a bald head if I have to. I am ok with that.