June 15, 2023
Hairy Situations
In this first hair-raising chapter, we meet me, a 50-something** career woman, queen of her spreadsheet jungle, hair looking on point (or so she thought).
Generally speaking, I'm pretty healthy. I workout consistently, avoid gluten (and luckily don't love sugar), and the only ongoing medical issue I have is an auto-immune disorder called "Hashimoto's" that seems to be well under control. Enter Stage Left: The Shedding.
It all started subtly, the way most life disasters do—with a sprinkle of denial and a heaping helping of "eh, it's probably nothing."
So, I did what any self-respecting woman in denial would do: I ignored it—big time.
In this first part of the process, you notice some strange things, but especially as a woman, you chalk it up to hormones or vitamins or stress or really anything else, because the thought “holy crap, I might be going bald” never crosses your mind (like it could as a man).
Things that made me go “well that's weird”, but not really think twice about:
So much hair in my brush, particularly after I washed my hair
The shower not draining right anymore. (BTW, drains give me the heebie jeebies)
Hair on the bathroom floor, like - A LOT
I blamed this on my poor little dog which resulted in him getting a haircut (furcut?).
Also, I hadn’t vacuumed in a while. I do love vacuuming for some odd reason. I guess that's something else to unpack somewhere down the line...
You only know what you know...
Looking back, what do I wish I had paid more attention to or done differently? Well, my hair was shedding, but it was hard to comprehend still at this point because I had no other context or awareness that this could possibly happen as a result of COVID+AutoImmune, let alone the extreme nature of it.
Ala, THE REASON THAT I STARTED THIS BLOG - so you can learn from my mistakes!!! If I can help anyone out there put the signals together and figure it out faster so they can get help, then spending all this time at 4am before my "real job" writing this blog will all being worth it.
Click Here for Part 2...
...where I delve deeper into the eyebrow-raising world of hair loss. Oh yeah, and subscribe below, please!
(*EDITOR'S NOTE, I had to fix that from "40-something" to "50-something". Denial, anyone?)
Did you end up on this page and find yourself unexpectedly in the middle of my story?
Click here to start it from the top.
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