Hello and thank you to anyone masochistic enough to read about me and my self-pity. My fuc*king hair just fell out of the side of my head. All at once it decided to let go in a patch a couple of inches in diameter. Plop. Just now. In a 3 inch by 1 inch strip from my hairline at my face back.
This happened to me almost four weeks after my proton beam radiation…a patch about that siaze on the right side of my head and a smaller patch on the left. Nobody else could see it if I brushed my hair right because the long hair above it covered it up, but it totally freaked me out. I was horrified when I was washing my hair and it just fell out like that! I cried even more than when I was first diagnosed! I guess it was because it was the first “outward” sign that something was wrong with me. Up till then, nobody could tell there was anything wrong with me by looking at me. That’s my psychological opinion of it anyway. lol
Hi marilyn
Must’ve been very stressful! Perhaps it could be caused by the stress of trying to cope with everything. Anyway, I hope that just what it is. My hair went all weird after my gamma-knife, but I think that was a side-effect of the awful steroids.
Thank you, Liam. The hair has grown back now. I just wear the hats in the summer now because the doc says I need to protect my head from the sun.
Hey! Welcome me to the “bald patch club”! Devastated, a really concrete reminder of the damned AVM!
Hi Marylin
I lost my hair at back after the embolisation, i actually thought the doctors must have glues my folicles or something. had it cut short as evrytime i brushed it more and more came out. then have had to wear it in ponytail for last six months as trying to hide fact that totally bald at back but now have just started growing back. my hairdresser said take sea kelp and brewers yeast tablets to help. Trust it to be bloody winter when it happened brrr
I think his is much more common than the doctor’s tell people. The worst part for me was thinking it was a really unlikely side effect. When you are dealing with statistics and probabilities (likelihood of having an AVM, chances of a bleed, risks of treatment, chance of complications, success rates, etc etc) The last thing you want to feel like is a statistical outlier. If I had been told that this was very likely to have happened, I would have been prepared, and I think it would have been far less traumatic. Instead I felt like I was doomed to be in that dreaded 5%–and I could not help but extend that thinking to other areas, like if my hair fell out, does that mean my brain will swell, too? I am happy to say I have a little bit of fuzz now.
Similar thing happened to me. I was so angry at the doctors because they never told me it would happen and when it did, they said I must be first person in over a decade - yeah right. It was very traumatic and I remember kicking the shit out of a chair in frustration and just crying as more and more fell out. I hope it grows back fast 