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Illustration: Marley Allen Ash
“You’re going bald,” my friend said. He said it with no small amount of disgust – as if it were a moral failing.
That was the beginning.
At first, I thought my baldness was due to a bad hairstyle. Barbers should never have used scissors on top. It took a long time for it to grow back because I cut it too close to my scalp. Others said I should just shave, but I had seen some pictures of my back. If your skull is large, you won’t be able to shave well. In my case, baldness is not beautiful.
But all is not lost. I still had my “failures”.
Hair doesn’t stand up straight. It stretches and sag. So, like a government job, a good hair in one place can cover up a less productive hair next door. However, if the number of lazy people exceeds the number of workers, it will become noticeable over time. So was my hair. Functioning hair follicles cannot cover lazy hair forever.
When you’re mentally strong, you think, “It’s just my hair, don’t say such shallow things.” It usually lasts until it passes the first mirror.
Going bald changed the way I saw the world. I resented all the men who were 25 years older than me. They didn’t have to make 25 square centimeters of hair do the work of 50 people. They didn’t have to consciously hold back their flops to avoid exposing their hair. Baldness progresses steadily. They walked out the exit of Walmart and didn’t look up at the exit camera or tremble at the sight of a giant white puddle on the top of their heads.
Eventually, dignity was abandoned and I used brown keratin powder and hairspray to cover my bald spots—the powder looked like crumbled flakes of brown Parmesan cheese—to wake up with stains on my pillow and to bead brown sweat off my forehead when I worked out.
That’s when I heard about discounted hair transplantation in Türkiye. The treatment was medieval-like. Pull out good hair from the back of your head, cut a groove in the bald area, transplant it, and hope it takes root. The actual surgery seemed less professional than the web description, but the reviews were good enough so I booked a ticket.
In Istanbul, a clinic driver met me. They put me up in a hotel. The next day, I went to the transplant office in the basement of the hotel at 9am.
Mr. Billa, the clinic director, met me. He was clean-shaven, with thick black hair, and smiled as he leaned behind his desk. He was wearing a crisp white collared shirt and had an expensive-looking gold chain around his neck.
He guided me through my day methodically. The surgery took place on the third floor, and I returned to the hotel, then headed to the airport to catch a flight home the next day. It was high tech. They’ve done it thousands of times. Did you bring cash? Please give me $2,000.
In the operating room, I lay on my chest, my face tucked into a rubber ring to keep me still. The first task was to rip a follicle from the back of the head and place it in a Petri dish. The least painful part of the nine-hour surgery was cutting the channel. It was the same as when Uncle Dave taught me how to graft trees on the farm many years ago.
By early afternoon, the extractors were tired. The new technician, the tweezers guy, spent five hours putting hair follicle plugs into the grooves of his woody scalp. I winced as each follicle was inserted. ah. I wince. ah.
I spent the day staring at the white-and-brown-flecked tile floor, listening to a technician flirt in Turkish with a beautiful nurse. Sting, sting, sting, sting. Please give me painkillers. Don’t be a baby. Sting. Sting. Sting.
The result was like a little brown pin stuck in my head.
A woman came in with a bucket to clean up the blood.
Back in Canada, the idea that no one would notice was a foolish dream. It took a week for the dried blood to fall off. The following week, college students looked at me in horror when I came to teach a class. I couldn’t wear a baseball cap because it was too tight on my delicate sprouts. A bandana would have made me look a little too pirate-like. And I couldn’t wear the special “head-protecting” hat I was given. The words of the transplant technician were too much for my fading self-esteem to comprehend.
“I had a hair transplant,” he said, standing on stage. “It will take a year to fill it up. Get used to it.”
And it certainly filled up. I used special shampoos, avoided direct sunlight, took vitamins, and slathered on some nameless skin cream with instructions in Turkish.
The tiny, pin-like grafts turned into stiff hairs, then short hairs, and those short hairs are now thick and thick. I no longer feel embarrassed looking at my head in a random mirror, and I start receiving compliments from neighbors and friends. The transplanted graft had roots extending from the forehead to the top of the head and looked like a new branch, indistinguishable from the old branch.
Paul Finlayson lives in Maple, Ontario.
