You’re Going Bald

A Rugby Match, a Turkish Torture Chair, and the Price of Looking Almost Normal Again

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I’ll never forget his words. I was minding my own business, engrossed in a rugby match on TV, when the verdict dropped. “You’re going bald,” he proclaimed, his voice dripping with the sanctimonious revulsion of a freshly minted evangelist spotting a sinner. As if my thinning pate were a moral lapse, a heresy he couldn’t let slide unreproved.

Thus began my ignominious plunge. The lush locks of my cellophane-wrapped school photos offered no sanctuary. I stumbled through denial, dallied briefly with the “bald is beautiful” delusion, and entrenched myself in the pathetic bunker of “the flop.”

But in Turkey, they swore, was my follicular salvation—a cut-rate Eden for the hairless.

Initially, I had blamed the bald patches on a ham-fisted barber. His shears butchered my scalp too close, I fumed, and six months should’ve mended the outrage. “Shave it,” the chorus sneered, but my cranium—bloated, mocking orb laughed at the buzzcut fad. “Olives on a toothpick,” one wit sneered. Worse, a friend’s four-year-old dubbed me “the Brain”—not for my intellect, but for my dome’s grotesque expanse. I’d have preened if she hadn’t pegged me as a cartoon rodent with world-domination fantasies.

The flop was my rickety lifeline, a follicular Ponzi scheme. Hair, like a crooked teller, can be coaxed to mask the deficits. A few diligent strands propped up the idle ones, keeping the illusion solvent. But when the slackers outnumber the workers, the bank collapses. My scalp followed suit. The flop tricked me into thinking the retreat had stalled, but post-shower clumps unveiled a bald Sahara creeping ever outward.

I’d muster fleeting “it’s just hair, don’t be vain” posturing, only to wilt at the mirror’s unsparing gaze. The beautiful can flaunt baldness; their surplus charm erases all flaws. I, alas, am no Apollo. My face demands hair like a beggar demands alms.

Balding twisted my lens on the world. I loathed men 25 years my senior, their defiant manes taunting my daily toil to stretch 25 square centimetres of hair over a 50-centimetre wasteland.

I’d pat the flop obsessively, dreading its desertion, and cringe at Walmart cameras exposing the pale crater atop my skull. By year fifteen, dignity was a ghost. I resorted to brown keratin powder—think Parmesan shavings for the scalp—and hairspray to cloak the void. My pillows bore brown smears; gym sweat ran in cocoa rivulets. “Blood?” gym oafs queried. No, just my pride’s last gasp.

Then, tales of Turkey’s hair-transplant bazaars reached me. Cheap follicles! High-tech miracles! I was snared.

In Istanbul, a clinic driver greeted me, his eyes crinkling above a COVID-19 mask, as he offered me apple slices and peanuts. The evening breeze cooled the cracked tarmac, where two boys kicked a soccer ball on a mangy lawn. Charming, until the reckoning.

The clinic director, Bilah, oozed smug perfection—crisp shirt, thick hair, gold chain screaming excess. Pistachios littered his desk, a prop for his nonchalance. He mapped my doom: hospital, third-floor surgery, hotel, then escape. “High-tech,” he crowed. “Thousands done.” And $2,000. Cash. USD.

The operating room was less futuristic, more like a medieval torture chamber. Technicians ripped follicles from my nape, each yank a jolt of agony, tossing them in a petri dish. “You hurt,” one snickered. “A Syrian screamed like a maiden once.” They skimped on numbing agents—they claimed that a genuine pain reaction helped them perform their jobs. It looked like they were trying to make the one syringe last the whole day.

A big head meant a vast bald spot and endless torment. Channel-cutting, the least brutal part, echoed my Uncle Dave’s tree-grafting lessons. By 1 p.m., the extractor flagged. Enter the tweezer man, wielding Costco-grade pliers, as he jams follicles into my scalp for five hours. Each stab was a wince, my face mashed into a rubber doughnut, staring at speckled tiles while he flirted with a nurse. Stab. Wince. Stab. Ouch.

The floor looked like I’d been involved in a ritual sacrifice, blood everywhere, as if some ceremony had involved stabbing me 4000 times over the day.

The result? A pincushion of brown pins. A woman mopped the blood with a bucket.

I flew home with bandages and a ridiculous-looking hat. I showed up at my class, my head was a mess of hair nubs, and dried blood that had stuck around stubbornly. There was no hiding this from my students, so I went at it head-on.

“I had hair surgery, I look like crap, I don’t have cancer, first comment anyone makes - and you fail the course. “

Stealth was a pipe dream. Dried blood clung for a week. My students gaped in horror at my scabby scalp. No caps—too tight for grafts. A bandana screamed pirate parody; the clinic’s headgear crushed my ego.

“I had a hair transplant,” I snarled from the podium. “It’ll fill. Cope.”

It did. Shampoos, no sun, useless vitamins, cryptic creams—it was a sadist’s regimen. But the grafts took. From forehead to crown, pins became bristles, then a thick mane indistinguishable from the old. Neighbours cooed; friends marvelled. Store mirrors lost their sting. The grafts took root, and the black pins of nubs of hair with follicles grew into thick, brown, reddish hair.

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