Hi HT2021,
Did you manage to get to the clinic in person on 6th Dec? If so, how did it go?
I did indeed have my check-up, and have since had my top-up procedure on Wednesday 5th January – sorry I’ve been very slow to update this thread.
To summarise the check-up discussion, Dr Arshad agreed that it wasn’t as dense as he'd hoped. He said that it will get a little fuller yet, and could see that there are still some hairs breaking through, but that it wouldn’t be enough for a satisfactory result, and offered me a free top-up procedure to add some extra density.
In terms of reasons for the lack of density, he suggested a few things:
- First of all, he said that he said that the yield itself was looking pretty reasonable, there just weren’t enough grafts to cover such a big area, and that he thought he probably should have used around 3,000 grafts first time around, rather than 2,500
- He also mentioned that he had used a 0.7 punch before, which is the reason that the donor area looks so untouched. However, this can come at a cost (you get less tissue, which can make it more prone to drying and trauma), and he said next time he would use a 0.85 or 0.9 punch
- He also suggested that having had my procedure in January, with the recovery process taking place during a time when I would be sat indoors with radiators on, perhaps that might dry grafts out a little, and perhaps spraying the grafts more frequently than every 2 hours would be a good idea
Here are the results from the 12-month mark, taken the night before the top-up procedure:
As for the procedure on January 5th, I don’t want to repeat too much from my first post other than to praise again the wonderful care and support from the team at the clinic, who do everything they can to make the day as comfortable as possible. In the end I had just under 1,000 further grafts put in to the frontal area, which will hopefully deliver the density that I was hoping for.
However, one thing that was different compared to last time was that I decided that I would have a small beard transplant procedure as well while I was there, to address the patchiness on my cheeks that has often annoyed me. When researching beard transplants online, I found it pretty hard to find much information (Dr Arshad mentioned that they only get around one beard transplant patient per month, and many of those will avoid posting anything publicly about it because it is that much harder to hide your identity in photos), so I’ll add some details about this here in case it helps anyone.
The grafts in beard transplant procedures can be taken either from the scalp or the neck – mine was taken from the neck (more precisely, the area just under the chin that is generally not visible to other people). The clinic said that Dr Arshad prefers to take the grafts from there because a) those hair characteristics have more in common with the native beard hairs on the face, and b) it doesn’t deplete the donor resources at the back of the head for potential future hair transplants. For beard-to-beard transplants, the clinic charge £5 per graft, and I had around 500 in total across both cheeks.
We did the hair and beard transplants consecutively across the day – starting with the injections and extractions from the head, then from the beard; then all of the channels created on the scalp, then on the cheeks; then the implants into the head and the cheeks were done at pretty much the same time. The day began at 7.45am, and I think we finished at around 5pm. The process is pretty much the same across both hair and beard transplants; and although I had wondered how it would feel having people work on my face and my neck, it actually felt no more strange than the hair transplant process.
The one thing that I hadn’t been prepared for was that the saline injection (which makes the skin on the cheeks taut enough to work on) resulted in my cheeks swelling up massively for the rest of the day. It would have been good to have been warned about this beforehand, because it meant that I had a lot of difficulty talking (my speech was muffled and certain letter sounds just became impossible to say), eating was impossible, and I could only drink through a straw - my partner and I had to head to the nearby Lidl on the way back to get some protein shakes and some straws so that I could have something resembling a meal that evening. Needless to say, this added a lot to the discomfort on the first night, but by the next morning I was basically able to speak, eat and drink as normal, so it was only short-lived. So if anyone is considering a beard transplant – I would definitely suggest you discuss this beforehand, and come prepared!
The recovery from the beard transplant has been similar to the usual process, but with a few differences. It takes a lot of extra care to not allow anything to touch your cheeks as well as your scalp; and as I had some grafts all the up to the side of my mouth, I also had to be extremely careful when brushing my teeth. In terms of washing, it just wasn’t really possible to wash the rest of my face for the first week – I didn’t want to risk getting water onto the grafts, and I wasn’t sure if even using face wipes would be wise, in case the saline sprays caused something from the wipe solution to run into the grafts. So I did feel increasingly grotty as the week went on, and when I was finally able to wash after a week it felt like I was reborn!
In terms of the washing process, the clinic recommended to apply shampoo to the both the scalp grafts and the beard grafts, and leave them for 10-15 minutes before rinsing off with water from a jug. However, the beard area also seems to recover a lot more quickly than the scalp does – the majority of the scabs from my donor area on the chin had gone within 4 or 5 days of the procedure, and as I write this on day 10, almost all of the scabs have now come off from my cheeks. The next stage is familiar – the new hairs should start to shed soon, and then grow back in a few weeks. However, if it wasn't for the residual redness on my cheeks, I think it would be quite hard to tell that I've had a procedure there at all.
Anyway I think that’s enough for now, but please feel free to ask if you have any questions about either procedure, and if I’ve forgotten anything I’ll come back later and add it in!
Finally, here’s some photos from the second hair transplant procedure:
After the procedure
Day 1
Day 3
Day 5
Day 10