How Shopping For Wigs Helped Me Come To Terms With My Alopecia
For a long time, I was afraid that wearing a wig would be hiding who I really am.
Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed
At my family home, a small, round mirror is placed in front of me as I sit at the dining table. The warm afternoon sunlight streams in through a window, spotlighting the excited faces of my huddled family. Behind me a woman I met only a few moments ago fiddles around in a suitcase trying to decide what I should look like. My appearance is out of my control now. I’m terrified. She places a soft bamboo cap on the crown of my head. With my two index fingers I hold the wiry meshing of a wig on what was once my hairline and pull the blonde strands over my scalp. I stare at this oh-so-familiar version of me in the mirror. I am in awe. It is identical to how my hair used to look and I can’t help but smile. Then my smile gives way to tears. I begin to sob, low and hollow.
“Get it together,” my aunty snaps, but with a hint of laughter in her deep voice. She’s used to seeing me cry. She wipes at her own cheek and turns away from me, my hair, and the mirror. The rest of my family do the same, one by one.
The person in the mirror is me 12 months ago. I stare at the strands of hair that fall down across my jawline and feel the fullness as I tuck the wig behind my ears. The hair feels so natural but so foreign, because it’s not really mine. I feel every painful second of the past year bubble to the surface again, reminding me of what I no longer have.
It took me a long time after I lost my hair to try on a wig. I was afraid that wearing one would be hiding who I really was now, as if I were ashamed by my condition rather than being true to myself and what I stood up for: to increase awareness about alopecia. To make it “normal” to be bald.
Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed
I began to lose my hair a few months after my 23rd birthday. It was April. I was curling my hair to go to the races when I found a small bald patch on the back of my head, around the size of a 10-cent coin. I was happy, I was healthy, and then suddenly I had a bald spot. What was going on? I spent the entire day trying to resist running my finger over the smooth spot.
After the fourth patch appeared in early August, I booked in to see my GP and he confirmed what I’d already self-diagnosed. I had alopecia. I was given a referral for an “urgent” appointment with a dermatologist, but when I called to book, the phone shaking in my hand, I was advised that I would have to wait nine weeks for a consultation.
Exactly a month later, my thick blonde curls were falling out in chunks. The stress was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I would brush my hair and there’d be three new patches. After every shower, I’d have to clean my drain, blocked by all the hair I’d lost in that 15 minutes. My hair was on the floor, in my sheets. It began to feel like it was everywhere except my head, where it belonged. In just one week I’d lost half the hair on my head, and it was soul-destroying. Still weeks out from the appointment I thought would present a magic solution, I decided to shave what little hair was remaining. It has never come back. I was trying to take control of the situation.
Eventually, I was given a treatment plan. First it was steroid injections, then immunotherapy. But every time I went in to begin the treatment, I was told my condition had progressed too far for it to be a viable option. I felt defeated, and no doctor could deny it.
Alopecia comes in many different forms, and of course, varying degrees. Essentially your immune system decides one day that it doesn’t like your hair anymore, so it starts attacking it, similar to how it would attack a virus. There’s alopecia areata, which sees a patient lose little round spots of hair; alopecia totalis, which is the loss of all of your hair on your head; and then alopecia universalis, which means there is no hair anywhere on the body. I have universalis. My eyebrows and eyelashes were the last to go and the hardest to say goodbye to.
It was after I’d lost everything that I began on immunosuppressants, which are medications that actively weaken your immune system. The aim of the game is to find the right balance between lowering your immune response enough to stop attacking you, but not so much that you’re constantly sick. It didn’t work: I was horrendously sick and for no gain. I was at war with my body, again.