CHECKINGIN'S Personal Journal

I went for my second procedure with Dr Arvind from December 12-15, 2006 for a total of 4 days of surgery. In this particular post, I'll post on trip, statistics, and some interesting body hair and quantity shots,
etc.

As for the trip, as usual Dr A and his staff were fantastic. Do not think of this as a shill because clearly results matter most and this is also extremely important to Dr A. Given that, he and his staff are extremely professional and caring. There is no stone left unturned when it comes to making sure the stay is a pleasant one.

For the 4 days, we did 7,412 grafts (93 transections) with 2,023 on day one, 2,370 on day two, 1,822 on day three, and 1,197 on day four. On day one where we worked on back and back/top all single grafts were paired. For this trip, I also utilized almost all of the remaining scalp grafts I had remaining (946). I also completely buzzed my scalp and am now 3+ weeks later just getting used to it.

I am in a very visible position at work and cannot hide under a hat or in a corner. This has been very hard and will continue to be that way for some time. I have some serious strip scars and so I am very self concious whenever my back is facing someone. I'll get into some of that later.

I don't have many good body hair shots pre-op, but you can look at my blog pics prior to first trip and see some. I didn't look like I had lost any body hair after that first trip.

Now for some interesting pics. I took pics of my body hair in the following way this time. Each of the pics has a scale of centimeters to give reference point to length of body hair. All hair was trimmed with beard trimmer prior to wet-shaving. The following pic provide the body hair by sections. Following pics:

ARMS - both arms, above elbow (not much) and below
CHEST
UNDER ARMS
LEFT THIGH - left leg only
LEFT LEG BELOW KNEE
PUBIC - not used in procedure
UPPER PUBIC
TOTAL BODY HAIR - right leg not included
TOTAL BODY HAIR HEIGHT - profile to show height of hair on paper, right leg not include











Additonal shots found with hair on body taken in November.

Upper Pubic
Upper Arm
Arm
Arm Underside/Wrist
Calf
Hamstring
Chest









Couple of things. First and foremost in my opnion is we are not doing donor sealing this time around. Clearly others have gotten good to very good results using this technique, but I didn't. There are so many variables between one person and another. In other words, what works for one won't necessarily work for another. Dr A stopped doing donor sealing (for most patients), but I was going to request this even if he hadn't stopped. Not doing donor sealing did two things, 1) left the graft intact and there was no guessing by technicians as to where the appropriate place was to make the separation 2) the grafts were implanted into the scalp sooner because they were not being stripped of the sealant.

Second, we utilized some scalp hair this time around and that is the best thing in my opinion is a mix of both.

BTW, while I didn't get nearly the growth that I was looking for, take a good look at my before pic and look how barren the back/top (especially back) were and then look at the pic in November. Clearly, there was growth evident, just not much for the number of grafts transplanted.

Detailed forum discussion for these pics can be found at:
http://www.hairsite4.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=12&topic_id=50361&mode=full