On having needles stuck into your head
The first bald spots I noticed weren’t the first ones I actually had. I had a few spots that preceded the one I found on the back of my head. The spot on my wrist and right next to my hairline were some of the first I noticed, but I just thought they were me getting old! Lucky for me, I was already shaving my head every time I took a mountain climbing trip. So, when the lady pointed out to me that I had a bald spot on my head, I just shaved the whole thing skin-tight.
My immediate thought was, “it’s gotta be some kind of insect bite.” I was in Hawaii at that time, and who knows what kind of jungle creatures they had in this wild land? Of course, I had experienced this kind of thing before, albeit from the observer seat.
One of my best friends, Joe, had touched a plant while we were walking in an Alaskan forest on a sea kayaking expedition. Tip: Never touch a plant just because it’s pretty…it might have poisonous spines underneath. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder than when our guide Scott confirmed the plant to be ‘devils club’. That pain my friend was feeling, pretty intensely in his finger, would dissipate but never go away…for the rest of his life!
I guess my ‘spider bite’ was karma for laughing hysterically for more than an hour at my friends’ predicament. I’m actually laughing right now remembering his face when he realized that Scott was not joking.
kar·ma
/ˈkärmə/
noun
(in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.
– informal
destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.
Subsequent searches for “bald spot” led me to alopecia. You’ve gotta be kidding? You can’t get that at almost 40, can you? Turns out, you can.
So, I go to a dermatologist. I got a recco from a friend about a guy on the upper east side. I cabbed it on my lunch break and sit in this ultra-posh doctor’s office. For some reason, when I think of dermatologist, I think of two things; teenagers with really bad acne, and old people with skin cancer. Apparently, there is now a third major category. Middle-aged women who inject botulism into their skin to look 15 years younger. I’m not judging. To each his own.
So, I get the news. It’s what I think it is. There is no cure for Alopecia. Sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes it just goes away. There’s no way to tell what mine is going to do. Do I wanna wait and see what happens, or try something?
The something was a tiny needle shooting steroids into my skin. I mean, I wasn’t getting those thirty rabies shots directly into the belly that my friend in third grade told me about. It wasn’t fun either. I’m going to have to keep doing this? Three more times, at least?
I suddenly had a newfound respect for any woman tough enough to do Botox!