A Happy Tale of a Bloody Day in Turkey

Happy ending though.

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​I will never forget his words. I had been minding my own business watching rugby on TV.

“You’re going bald," he announced.

He said it with no small measure of disgust—as if it was some moral failing. He spoke like a new convert leaving the church, unable to restrain himself in his zeal, like he couldn’t let my unrepentant burgeoning baldness go unrebuked.  

That was the start; all the thick hair in those cellophane-wrapped school pictures couldn’t save me now.  I’d wander through denial to a brief repose at  "bald is beautiful" and an extended stop at "the flop."  But finally, Turkey would bring redemption. 

But at first, I blamed the balding on a bad haircut. The barber should never have used the shears on top. He cut too close to the scalp, which took a long time to grow back. But six months is enough.  Just shave it off, someone else said, but I’d seen a few pictures of myself from behind; large craniums don’t do well with shaving.  “Olives on a toothpick” was the way it was described.  My friend’s young daughter referred to me as the Brain, as in “Pinky and the Brain;” while I might have been flattered at being referred to as the Brain - at four years old, she wasn’t judging intelligence, just head size. 

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

Hair doesn't stand straight up. It grows and flops. So the hair from one good area can cover for its less productive neighbour, like a bank. A few workers can stay in the corner stall, wait for their pension, and order from catalogues, and the bank will still be in the black. But if the slackers outnumber the workers, it will eventually show itself at the bottom line. So with my hair. The functioning follicles can't cover the slackers forever.

At first, the flop worked. Only people taller than me could look down at the top of my head and know the truth. And sometimes, the flop would begin to deceive me, leading me to believe that although my hair was thinning, it had stopped its steady march to baldness. But after showers, with my hair clumped, there was scalp where there should have been hair.

At times of strength, I do my "It's just hair, don't be so shallow" pretensions, which usually lasts until the first mirror.   Of course, many can pull it off, but they've got surplus beauty. 

Surplus beauty can overcome bad fashion and receding hairlines. Those models could wear mid-seventies fashion castoffs, let someone blind drunk cut their hair, and they would still be pretty. I don't have surplus looks. I need hair. 

Going bald has made me view the world differently. All those men, 25 years older than I, who didn’t have any growing expanses on top, didn’t have to look in the mirror in the morning and try to make 25 square centimetres of hair do the work of 50. I resented them. They didn’t need to adjust, adjust again, or self-consciously pat down the flop so the hairs didn't leave their post and expose the steady progression of baldness. They didn’t walk through Walmart exits, looking up at the exit camera and shuttering at the massive white puddle on their crown. 

Fifteen years later, the flop was just a simpy vestige of its former self. Dignity was abandoned, and I would use a special brown keratin powder and hair spray to cover the bald patch.  The powder looked like crumbled flakes of brown parmesan cheese.  My pillows would have brown stains when I woke up, and beads of brown sweat ran down my forehead when I worked out.  No, it wasn’t blood, but thank you for asking unnamed persons at the gym. 

But then I heard about discount hair transplants in Turkey.

In Istanbul, I was met by a driver from the clinic. He turned, his dark eyes squinting warmly above a COVID mask, and offered me an open bag of apple slices and peanuts. Stepping out onto the cracked tarmac, a welcome evening breeze neutralizing the heat, two boys in white shorts lazily kicked a soccer ball on an overmowed brown lawn beside the parking lot. 

At nine sharp the following day, I met the clinic director; he was clean-shaven with thick black hair, pleasant as he leaned back behind his desk, a small yellow plate with a half dozen pistachios at the corner.  He wore a crisp white collared dress shirt and sported an expensive-looking gold chain around his neck.  His name was Bilah, the man I had spoken to on the phone, the one I sent to whom I had sent my scalp pictures.  

He methodically ran me through my day: a drive to the hospital, surgery on the third floor, back to the hotel, and flying out the following day.  It was high-tech; they had done thousands of them.  Did I bring cash?  $2000, please. USD.

Off to the operating room.  High tech, my ass. Rip the follicles out of the back of my head and put them in a petri dish, each extraction giving me a jolt of pain. 

“You have pain,” the technician laughed.  “Once, I had a Syrian man who screamed like a girl,” he said.

 They didn’t want to use too much topical painkiller as it would dull my response.  

A big head equals a big bald spot and a long time.  Medieval.  The least painful part of the nine-hour surgery was the channel 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 one p.m., the extractor was tired.  A new technician, the tweezer man, used his high-tech tweezers, which looked like they came from Costco, and spent five hours putting those follicle plugs into those tree-like scalp channels. Each follicle insertion was a wincing-producing stab, my face hidden from him as I lay on my chest.  Wince.  Ouch.  Wince.  Ouch.  My face was pushed into a rubber hospital doughnut, staring at a white and brown speckled tile floor, listening to him flirt in Turkish with the pretty nurse. Stab, stab, stab, stab.  Painkiller, please. Stab. Stab. Stab.  

The final result was like tiny brown pins had been inserted in my head.  

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

b

(The AI went overboard on the blood; it was not bad).

The idea of nobody noticing was a foolish dream; it took a week for the dried blood to come off. My university students looked horrified when I came to teach my class the following week. I wasn’t allowed to wear a baseball cap, which was too tight for the delicate new hair shoots. A bandana would have been a bit too random pirate, and the special protect your head that the technician gave me was beyond the grasp of my fading self-esteem.

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

And it did fill in: special shampoos, no direct sunlight, vitamins I knew did nothing, obscure skin creams with Turkish instructions. 

But it came in.   I no longer felt pricks of embarrassment when looking at my head in random store mirrors.

There were compliments from neighbours and friends. Those tiny grafts, like pins, had become stiff bristles of hair, then short hair, and the short hair was now complete and thick. Those transplanted grafts had taken root, from the forehead to the crown, like new branches indistinguishable from the old.

Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.

But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.

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