The scene: weekend away with hubby in Utrecht, Netherlands. Karel V hotel (very posh), bathroom (very clean), just finished showering…..
husband: not very good housekeepers here; there is hair all over the bathroom!
(pause)
(puts glasses on)
me: crap …
The hair loss started very innocuously. A few hairs in the shower, a few in the sink, a few on my shoulders particularly noticeable when I was wearing black (especially as my hair has lots of grey in it) but not many, and I still had loads of hair #notworried
The hair loss continued through October, and chatting with my family and friends, the consensus was it was either a) the menopause (yes I am at that age too – it never rains but it pours right?) or b) stress.
I did google hair loss and the menopause, and indeed this can cause your hair to ‘thin out’, but I was on HRT (estragon only) which generally seemed to help with this.
I also didn’t think I was particularly stressed, although I was working on a project about to go live (I’m a software consultant) and when I mentioned it to some of the other girlz on the project it turned out I wasn’t the only one losing their hair, so maybe that was it.
As a side note, have you ever noticed that when someone tells you you are stressed, that in itself makes you stressed even if you weren’t to begin with?!
Anyway, and by now, I could literally pull it out in clumps, so I wasn’t entirely convinced it was either of these things.
Of course, once you realise you are losing your hair you then notice it way more, it’s a bit like when you get a new car and you then see them everywhere.
The first place I really noticed the ‘shedding’ (as I came to call it) was how ‘furry’ my pillow was each morning when I woke up – YUK !! I expect that it had been like this for a while but I hadn’t twigged it.
I also realised that my hair wasn’t growing either, under my arms or on my legs, although this I considered good news – every cloud and all that 🙂
Roll forward a few weeks, and my worry metre was increasing, so after a big of nagging from my husband (stop going on about it and book a doctor’s appointment) at the beginning of November I made a non-urgent appointment with my GP for the 21st November.
She seemed to be in agreement with friends and family and mentioned the menopause and stress, but when I pointed out the now small bald patch on the back of my head, she paused for thought and seemed to wonder out loud, almost to herself, whether this was sufficient for a diagnosis of alopecia ?
She must have thought it was because she printed out a leaflet for me, said she could see hairs in my follicles, which was a positive thing, and told me not to be too worried. She ordered some blood tests, we booked another appointment for me to return to get the results, and in the mean time she gave me some cream to rub on my bald patch, although she equally didn’t give me the impression that this would actually do anything!
I left the surgery feeling a bit disappointed. I wasn’t sure what I had expected but I felt that perhaps she hadn’t realised how worried I was becoming and equally how certain I was that this was something more than the menopause or stress. They always say that you know your own body best, and the rate at which my hair was falling out seemed way more significant and didn’t appear to bode well.
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