victory

Bonnie has been a member of The Women’s Hair Loss Project since Nov. 2008. Yesterday she wrote the most incredible blog in the network, declaring victory in her war with hair loss. Myself and so many others are beyond thrilled over her recent news. So with her permission, I am posting it here for everyone to read.

Here is the post:

I’ve been thinking about writing this blog for a long time, hoping that my success with regrowth would continue and that I would have great news to share. It’s weird but I guess I was sort of waiting it out to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating or waiting for the other shoe to drop… the universe saying HAHA! and my hair to start falling out again, but I think I can now say that I feel like I’m in the clear. I think I have finally won this war. Wow.

It’s been such a challenging year and half with all of this and I still cant imagine how uncluttered my brain must have been before all of this happened. It has been such a life-changing thing that it’s VERY hard to get past it. I know all of you understand this.

Slowly, slowly, since I shaved my head on 6/1, things have been improving. My shedding stopped a couple of weeks after the buzz (I stopped Spiro the same day) and it began filling in little by little. I really had some particularly thin spots and used A LOT of Toppik for a while, but I slowly stopped using that, quit the Xanax (I do not know how I would have gotten through 2009 without Xanax!), kept going with my supplements (fish oil, flax oil, vitamins and iron) and tried to exercise real patience and it has actually worked. My thin spots have slowly filled in and they KEEP filling in and I dare say that I think my hair is back to normal. Sigh and a big deep breath! For the first time in a very long time, I can now actually say that my hair looks good. it has taken me a LONG time to be able to say that and mean it.

I am still a product junkie (maybe now more than ever) and I still take detours by every mirror to check my hair out a zillion times a day. I think I will probably always.

I’m ready for a cleansing ritual for getting past this. Today I am going to go back to the wig salon and ask them about donating the beautiful wig that I bought there (and never actually wore) and maybe even the Gremlin wig too if they’ll take it. Yeah, the pictures of that are scary but KatKat did a perfectly AMAZING job of taming that beast. I’m going to see if I can donate the wig(s) to another woman that is suffering with hair loss and can’t afford to get something that will make her feel more comfortable.

I just wanted to update all of you. I have found such amazing support here and I truly cannot imagine how I would have gotten through this battle without WHLP. it has literally been a lifesaver for me.

I wish all of us more hair than we know what to do with (only on our heads). MUAH!

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I had written awhile back but wanted to send you my story again, and this time post some positive updates.

One thing that I noticed way back when my hairloss journey started, was that the negative posts and testimonials by far outweighed the positive ones. My fear was that most women were losing this hairloss battle. My hope was that once they solved their hairloss nightmare, they were too busy not worrying about their hair to post their updates. I want to submit my story because I am having positive results as I attempt to figure out what has happened to my hair and how to stop the cycle of loss.

It was 2004 when my life changed. It was 3 months after I had stopped taking birth control (alesse) and my hair was coming out in ropes. I’ll never forget taking a shower before going out one Friday evening, and my hands were covered with hair. At the time, I had no clue that it was related to the cessation of using birth control. I thought I was dying, from cancer, from something. I stayed home that night and didn’t go out, I’ll never forget sobbing the whole evening, scouring the internet trying to figure out what was going on. My vanity was bruised. I remember feeling too ugly and embarrassed to be social or even go to the gym. I took a 3 week leave of absence from my job to go be with my then-boyfriend (now wonderful husband!) in Europe where he was for work. I needed his support and he was truly there for me no matter how embarrassed I was. I had extensions put in after much research, just to make me feel like I had hair again. I did everything I could to mask what was going on with my hair, while I devoured information to figure out what happened to me. It was then that I realized it was the birth control pill.

I made the mistake of jumping back on birth control because doctors told me that I might be responsive to a hair-friendly pill like Yaz or Yasmin. I chose Yasmin and figured I would just stay on it the rest of my life if I had to. Back then, all I cared about was how I looked, not about my health. I kept the extensions in for about 2 years. One day I went into the salon to get them done and my stylist said – “You know you don’t need these anymore. They are just your security right now. Your hair is fine.” What?? My hair was fine?? I was so used to the weight of the extensions that I didn’t believe her. She washed my hair and cut it without the extensions, and we blowed it dry. She was right, I looked totally normal. I was ELATED. I don’t think I stopped touching my hair for days. It was all mine, and I looked absolutely normal. It had thin spots, sure, but I could wear it up or down and it had body and I looked like me again. It was not nearly as thick as it was before the loss, but it was enough. [click to continue…]

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