Tweet
This 50ish year old fellow was disfigured by plug surgery in the 90s. He and his family give a terrible story of his self consciousness limiting his participation in his kids’ activities and his need to wear hats to even dressier social functions. His donor hair is quite wirey and we got a few more grafts than I expected from his scar filled strip. Shown are preop, intraop, and 1 week pictures. A couple of issues warrant clarification. First, as I’ve posted before, I treat these cases like trying to camouflage a Christmas tree farm. Those plugs contain good, growing hair…and I don’t want to change that. Rather, we simply want to plant a LOT of hairs at the hairline and irregularize that otherwise straight arc framing his face. Second, he has really dark hair, and really white skin. That makes his plugs look even worse. Those qualities don’t help me at all in his repair, but I can’t change them. Third, he simply doesn’t have enough hair to accomplish everything at this setting and together we set priorities. We’ll hopefully come back with a second case and join the top to the sides and work back a little further to cover the remaining plugs on the right.
But overall this is a great case. We got 2300 grafts, about 800 singles which were placed along the hairline as close to his existing plug grafts as I could get without damaging their roots. And we did a 3 layer closure. The intraop strip picture shows the deepest layer in, taking the tension off of the skin edges. Lastly he did a decent job cleaning and I’ll plan to see him in 5 weeks for a scar check and more pictures. Since these cases often take longer to grow in due to scar tissue, I expect it will be late 2014 til we get a nice result and start planning a second case.
Dr. Lindsey McLean VA
But overall this is a great case. We got 2300 grafts, about 800 singles which were placed along the hairline as close to his existing plug grafts as I could get without damaging their roots. And we did a 3 layer closure. The intraop strip picture shows the deepest layer in, taking the tension off of the skin edges. Lastly he did a decent job cleaning and I’ll plan to see him in 5 weeks for a scar check and more pictures. Since these cases often take longer to grow in due to scar tissue, I expect it will be late 2014 til we get a nice result and start planning a second case.
Dr. Lindsey McLean VA
Attached Files
Comment