Hair transplant adventure in Vietnam part 1

So as I mentioned before some pictures of me turned up on the bowling website and I had no idea that my hair loss had become so profound. Some people handle this sort of thing gracefully and just shave their heads or deal with it but I decided to go another path. I decided to go the extra mile, or in this case 700km, and got get some hair transplants from the back of my head inserted into the top and front of my head.

There has been a relatively major hiccup though and it is one that has me quite a bit upset, because it may end up meaning that the entire procedure cannot take place and this trip will have been a wasted one.

As it turns out, I have high blood pressure, and this could be because of a lot of different reasons such as stress, the fact that I drink daily, and the fact that I use a tobacco product called snus that is like smoking cigarettes but without the cancer. I was completely unaware of the fact that I have high blood pressure because I rarely go to doctors unless there is something seriously wrong with me.

They wont do the procedure if you have high blood pressure because there can be complications with the anesthesia which in very rare cases, could be fatal. I would obviously rather be bald than dead so I guess it is good that they take these precautions.

I really don't like seeing these images of myself because like I said before, I was unaware that my crown had become so profound over the years. However, this is my life now. Those dots you see on my head is where they plan to put the transplanted hairs, which they remove from the back of your head. The hairs on the back of almost anyone's head are basically indestructible, and that is why your great uncle Bob may have ONLY those hairs remaining. The thing is that most of us cut those hairs off when we get a haircut anyway. I don't know why they are so strong but that does seem to be the case.

The other area where I am struggling is the same place that a lot of other people do as well. This is very common with male pattern baldness and it gets worse as you get older. It's just a part of life. Sometimes I think it would have been better to just shave it all off and deal with it, but since I have the money and want to do it, I decided to give it a go.

Then they do some wizardry to estimate the square centimeters that they will need to cover and this determines how many hairs they are going to have to take from the back of your head to move to other areas. If it is sounding like a rather gruesome process that's probably because it actually is exactly that.

For whatever reason, they cannot put you completely under for this procedure and they only use local anesthetic shots to completely numb your head. Then they have some really advanced tools that was designed by some guy in Belgium that is able to drill just 0.6 millimeters into a hair follicle without destroying it. They then suspend this in some sort of magic liquid that keeps it alive and move them, one by one, to other parts of your head.

This, in a shell, is how I understand the process. It all might be in vain though because if this medicine that they gave me that is called telmisartan and amlodipine doesn't work I wont be able to do the procedure at all. This medicine is something that is prescribed to people with hypertension and other heart and kidney related problems. It's quite cheap and widely available although it probably costs hundreds of dollars in USA because your the medical system there sucks. Here it was just over $3 for a week's worth.

I may have actually given them a false positive though because of the fact that I was completely oblivious about the fact that there were some qualifications that you have to pass in order to be eligible for the procedure. I figured that if you had the money to pay for it that they would basically do it for anyone.

This is my first foray into elective surgery so I guess you learn these things as you go along.

I will readily admit that I am not the most innocent person when it comes to health. I drink more days than not and a lot of those days I drink to excess. I have snus in my mouth from basically the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep, I regularly take Ambien or Valium for sleeping, and any time I have a headache or really just any ache I take Tramadol, which is a synthetic opiate. I do exercise quite a lot but to say that I am healthy would be a massive lie.

I'm really hopeful that the operation can get the green-light tomorrow because if it doesn't, then this trip will have been a complete waste of time. Well I guess one good thing can come out of it, I will now be more mindful of my blood pressure because that isn't something that I have really paid any attention to at any point in my life.