Five months ago, I realised I was going bald.
Big deal, right? This happens to a a lot of people. You notice the thinning one day in the mirror, and over the next few months go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, mid-life crisis, ill-judged affair, buy a motorbike. Then finally you realise it's not a big deal. It's something that happens at a certain age - a landmark, really. You give the motorbike to your teenage son/daughter, get marriage counselling or a divorce, and settle comfortably into the slide down to old age.
Maybe. But for me it was a little different. You see, I'm not a middle-aged man seeing the first signs of ageing. I'm a nineteen year old girl, and the two-inch diameter bald patch I discovered was a symptom of the auto-immune condition called Alopecia Areata. At the moment I don't know if it will ever grow back, if I will end up completely bald, or if my hair will continue to fall out in patches for the rest of my life. So for the moment, because I don't really know what else to do, I'm going to write about it here.
Some facts: the condition isn't altogether rare - some 1 in 50 people will experience it in their lifetime. Very little is known about what causes Alopecia, although it's probably a genetic predisposition. As with most auto-immune conditions, where the body attacks its own tissue, there isn't really a cure - steroids are sometimes tried, but aren't always effective. Usually, you'll have one patch appear, and within a year it will begin to re-grow.
It's been five months now, and while no more patches have appeared, the single one I have has spread up my head to three or four inches in length. The rest of my hair, which used to be thick and wavy, has thinned dramatically. To disguise these effects I now wear my hair up all the time.
That's pretty much the basics of what's happening. Over the next few months I'm going to try and blog pretty regularly about what I'm feeling, why this might be happening to me, and how I deal with it.
P.S. The picture of Rapunzel is supposed to be a joke :)
