I flew to Istanbul for a hair transplant. The treatment was medieval – but it worked

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“You’re going bald,” my friend announced. He said it with no disgust – as if it were some kind of moral failing.

That was the beginning.

At first, I blamed the baldness on a bad haircut. The barber should never have used the scissors above. He cut very close to the scalp, which took a long time to regrow. Just shave it, someone else said, but I had seen some pictures of me from behind. large skulls don’t do well with shaving. In my case, bald isn’t pretty.

But all was not lost: I still had “the flop”.

Hair doesn’t stand straight. It grows and falls. Thus, hair from a good area can cover its less productive neighbor, as in a public job. But if the lazy are more than the workers, it will show eventually. So it was with my hair. Functional follicles couldn’t cover slackers forever.

In times of mental strength, I think, “It’s just hair, don’t be so shallow.” This usually lasts until I pass the first mirror.

Baldness has made me see the world differently. I resented all those men, 25 years older than me, who didn’t have to make 25 square centimeters of hair do the work of 50. They didn’t have to consciously tap the flap to keep the hairs from exposing the steady progression of baldness. They didn’t walk through the WalMart exits, looking up at the exit camera and cringing at the huge white puddle on their crown.

Eventually, dignity gave up and I used brown keratin powder and hairspray to cover the bald patch. The powder looked like crushed flakes of parmesan cheese. When I woke up, my pillows were stained and beads of brown sweat were running down my forehead from working out.

Then I heard about discounted hair transplants in Turkey. The treatment sounded medieval: Pull good hairs from the back of your head, cut canals in the bald area, graft them and hope they take root. The actual surgery seemed less technical than the web description, but the reviews were pretty good so I booked my ticket.

In Istanbul, I was met by a guide from the clinic. They put me in a hotel. the next day I went to the transplant office in the basement of the hotel at 9 am

Bilah, the clinic manager, met me. He was clean shaven with thick black hair and smiled as he leaned back behind his desk. He wore a crisp white collared shirt and an expensive gold chain around his neck.

He methodically ran me through my day: the surgery would take place on the third floor, I would be taken back to my hotel, then to the airport to fly home the next day. It was high tech. they had made thousands of them. Did I bring cash? US $2,000 please.

In the operating room, I lay on my chest, my face squeezed into an elastic circle to keep it still. The first order of business was to rip the follicles from the back of my head and put them in a petri dish. The least painful part of the nine-hour surgery was the canal cutting. It was just like my uncle Dave had taught me all those years ago on the farm when he showed me how to graft trees.

By early afternoon, the exporter was tired. A new technician, the tweezer, spent five hours inserting these follicle plugs into these tree-like channels of the scalp. Every follicle insertion made me shudder. Ouch. Wince. Ouch.

I spent that day staring at a white and brown speckled tile floor, listening to my technician flirt in Turkish with the beautiful nurse. Knife, knife, knife, knife. Painkiller, please. Don’t be a baby. Stab. Stab. Stab.

The result was as if tiny brown pins had been inserted into my head.

A lady came in with a bucket to clean up the blood.

Once I got back to Canada, the idea of ​​not being noticed was a pipe dream. it took a week for the dried blood to fall off. My students looked horrified when I came to teach my class the following week. I wasn’t allowed to wear a baseball cap as it was too tight for the thin new hair growth, a bandana would be a bit too piratey for me and the special “protect your head” hat given to me by the vaccination technician was beyond me from the perception of my weakened self-esteem.

“I had a hair transplant,” I said as I stood on the podium. “It will take a year to fill in. Get used to it.”

And she did add: I used special shampoos, stayed out of direct sunlight, took vitamins and applied dark skin creams with Turkish instructions.

These tiny, pin-like cuttings had become stiff hairs, then short hair, and the short hair was now full and thick. I no longer felt pangs of embarrassment looking at my head in random mirrors and there were compliments from neighbors and friends. Those transplanted cuttings had taken root, from the forehead to the crown, they were like new branches indistinguishable from the old ones.

Paul Finlayson lives in Maple, Ont.