Christmas was normal, as usual. Family get together, presents exchange, same old same old. Nothing out of the blue.
We get to my great-grandmother's old apartment, the one she lived in before she died, which is where we are staying that night. It's right across the yard fro my grandparent's house where we just spent Christmas Day. Instead of driving two hours back home, we decided we were going to stay overnight. Since my grandparent's house can't really accommodate sleeping arrangements for all five of us, we're staying in my great-grandmothers apartment.
I was taking out my hair, getting ready for bed, when I felt something weird on top of my head. I went and looked in the mirror in the bathroom. There was a small bald spot near my hair part on top of my head. I went to go show my mom.
"Hey mom, can you look at this?" I asked as I walked into the master bedroom.
"Yea sure, what is it?" She responded.
"I think I have another small bald spot."
She took a look at it and confirmed what I had thought it was. A few years ago I had found a similar bald spot on my head but this one was in the back and a little easier to hide. We never thought anything of it because It grew back before anything else happened. We though this time was just going to be the same way, so we weren't too concerned about it. It's almost as if it was normal.
At this point, we had found out that my grandma's sister had lost all the hair on her head. I was told that it was because she was stressed out because of a surgery she had to get. I know now why it really happened, but that's all I knew at the time. So at the time, it wasn't anything related to what was happening to me. I mean all I had was just a little bald spot. It wasn't anything to worry about.
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Now it's March. The bald spot is still there. We make an appointment with my regular doctor to see if she can help us.
I'm going to do some tests to see if it's worms or something of that nature," she told us. We'll also take some blood to do some tests to see if it's something else. In the mean time, you should also consider going to a dermatologist." She gave us the information for a dermatologist that she recommended.
All tests came back negative. My primary care doctor didn't know what was wrong with me. My mom went to go make a dermatologist appointment with the one my primary care doctor recommended. The appointment was about a month from the time she called so my mom looked around for a different dermatologist to go to. I had an appointment for one that was closer, but something happened and we ended up cancelling that one and waiting a month.
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By the time my dermatologist appointment came around, I had a few more bald spots on my head that I had to cover up. We filled out all the paper work since I was a new patient there and then waited in the waiting room.
"Allison?" The nurse said. My mom and I got up and followed her into a room. She closed the door and asked why we were here. I looked to my mom who explained everything to her. Then she left to go get the doctor.
"Hi!" Said the bubbly dermatologist that walked through the door. "My name is Samantha. Why are we here today?"
Once again, my mother explained what had been happening. Samantha came over and examined the bald spots while talking to her. She knew exactly what it was.
I had alopecia. Alopecia is an auto immune disease where your immune system attacks your hair, causing it to fall out. There's three stages of alopecia. The first stage is the most common form of the disease. It's called alopecia areata. This is when the hair falls out in circular bald spots in your hair. This can then develop into alopecia totalis, which is when you lose all the hair on your head. This is less common than alopecia areata. The rarest form of alopecia is alopecia universal is. This is when you lose all the hair on your body. Eventually this is what I was diagnosed with.
There's many different treatments for alopecia. I started out with getting steroid injections into the bald spots in my head. Yea I know, sounds painful. But I was willing to do anything if it could help my hair to grow back. And it did help, in the spots where the injections where. I went about every three weeks to get injections. The hair kept falling out though. Yes, it was growing back but only in the injection spots. It was starting to become harder to cover it up.
My first wig was a synthetic hair wig. I had to wear a wig cap with that one because the inside lining hurt my head. It looked horrible. My mom and I had gone to see a hair salon that specialized in wigs a few weeks before my senior ball. The hair stylist told us about this charity called Children with Hair Loss that helped kids until age 21 with cancer and alopecia get wigs for free. My mom applied for me to get a wig and within a few weeks, I had my first very own real hair wig. This one looked so much better than the synthetic wig. CWHL asks for a picture of what you want the hair to look like when they send you a wig. My mom sent in my senior picture because that was the closest we could find to what I wanted, what I had before. They matched my hair in that picture so well, I was amazed. My mom and I cried, my mom more than me. We took the wig back to the hair stylist who had recommended CWHL to get it styled the way I wanted so that it could look more like real hair rather than a wig.
The week before senior ball, I had my real hair wig all ready to go. It was pretty amazing how well it looked. I had to get an eyebrow pencil to fill in my eye brows because those were gone too, but once I got that and learned how to style my wig, it was hard for the average person to tell anything was wrong.
And that's how I lived for about a year. I hid it from everybody. I barely even wanted to tell anyone in my family. I definitely didn't want to tell my college roommate. But I knew it had to be done. So I told the minimum amount of people that I could tell, and tried to hide it from everyone else.
This was terrible for my self esteem. I was always worried about whether or not my hair looked okay or whether or not people could tell that it was a wig. My family noticed it changed me too. It was hard to cope with it, it still is even. But learning that this is what it was going to be like for the rest of my life was one of the hardest things to learn, and I still haven't completely leaned it. The rest of this story is going to be my journey into accepting it, which is going to be hard. My mental health has gone down the drain, whether this has a factor to it or not I'm not really sure. It sure is easy to blame it though.
