Dr. Google

Sometimes when I am bored, I google “Alopecia Areata Information.”  Just to see what comes up.  Although my smart computer has changed the colour of the webpages on the search list that I have previously visited, it is still amusing to try a new website once and a while.  Except that the most accurate websites are the ones I can’t understand.  I can read the intro paragraph, and a few sentences, but sooner or later I am lost.  The page has so much information on it, but it’s empty to me.  None of that info will help me.  It doesn’t make my day better knowing that the T cells in my skin are confused.  It only makes my mind more confused.  How does a cell become confused in the first place?  And why don’t any of the websites simplify the information?  It makes me feel dumb, not being able to explain my own condition.  As far as treatment goes, it’s less than satisfactory.  There is no “curative treatment available”.  Basically each alopecia areata victim becomes a science experiment.  Currently I am getting steroid needles in my head.  Shots in my head.  About thirty or forty needles a visit, every couple months.  It needs to be more frequent than that but that is all I can do right now.  They hurt.  The steroid shots I get in my head are supposed to get rid of the confused T cells, so that the hair can grow normally.  Except that the hair doesn’t really grow normally. And also, the hair might fall out if I ever stop doing the steroid injections. Oh, and one more thing.  I can’t do the injections for the rest of my life.  As an aside, I want to take a moment to talk about intuition.  When it comes to health, I believe in intuition a lot.  Sometimes its hard to technically know whats up, but usually you can feel it somehow.  In the fall I went to a health clinic when my hair was just starting to fall out.  The doctor wrote me a prescription for the medicine that is used in the steroid injections I am getting.  So I went out and got the medicine and returned a week later.  I showed him the medecine, and he proceeded to tell me that he did steroid injections for alopecia when he was in med school.  And by the looks of this guy, I think the textbooks have changed quite a bit since his med school days.  And so, trusting my intuition, I didn’t let him inject me.  But holy crap.  Just knowing that if I said yes, he probably would have done it, scares me so much.  We put so much trust in doctors.  I know they go through so much training, and learning, but still, I find it scary that I had to put up my guard.  And scary that he thought he had enough training to do it.  And maybe the shots would have been fine, I have no idea knowing how hard they are to do, or how much one needs to know in order to administer them.  All I know, is that whoever is going to be sticking needles in my head must have done it for more than just a few days back in med school.  Why?  Well you don’t need to go to med school to understand why.  Your noggin is important!  Ugh, I apologize for my conventional medicine bashing, just lately I have been a bit let down by the "system". Back to the hair growth.  While on an alopecia website scavenger hunt this morning, I found out that alopecia does not attack the little white hairs on your body.  This is confusing because, some of the hair that grows back on my head is white and fuzzy.  Whatever! So, the hair that’s growing back on my head is a mixture of peach fuzzy white hair and jet black, straight hair.  Okay it’s straight because it’s not long enough to be curly even if it wanted to be.  However, in good news, my hair sometimes flattens a bit to my head.  This means it is longer! How so? Well, because short buzz cuts don’t have enough length to flatten at all.  In bad news, my hair line is still non-existent.  Sounds like a weather report!  From the east we have small patches of white fuzz… haha :)