I have always had a lot of hair. But a couple of months after being really ill in hospital, my hair started to fall out. A lot of it. After speaking to the Doctor and my own research it was concluded that it was due to medical trauma and I hoped that it would come back.
I lost about 90% of my hair and was left with enough to work with to create a comb-over of sorts. Luckily, almost 9 months later I have no bald spots left and it’s growing back. Slowly but surely. From the beginning of it falling out up to today, I’m still dealing with the length, texture and condition of my hair.
When it started to fall out I looked online for anything that would give me some ideas to help care for my hair. But there wasn’t very much. So, I hope that sharing My Hair Care After My Hair Loss with you, whether your hair has fallen out or not will be able to help you in some way.
I was Reading this: https://hairsolutionsblog.com
First Things First
The first thing I did was throw away my hairbrush. It was falling out very freely on its own throughout the day and using a hairbrush only removed more hair. Plus, I wouldn’t be using it for a least a year if not more and it wasn’t nice to see at such an upsetting time.
Using a comb was a lot gentler and I felt like I had more control. I would comb it in the morning into a high ponytail with a gentle hair tie, such as the Indivisible/Magi bobble pictured or a soft fabric tie, and not touch it again until the end of the day. I’d still have hair falling out all day and didn’t like anymore touching my hair. But it helped to cover the bald spots appearing and less hair fell out in one go than when my hair was down.
Secondly
Washing my hair had become a military operation and I started to wash my hair less to reduce any stress on the follicles. I don’t know if this worked but when I did wash my hair it would come out in large clumps and I’d had enough of crying in the shower with more hair in my hands than on my head.
It had also become a lot drier. Not just from reduced sebum production, but also the hair itself and my scalp. Making it itchy and I wasn’t going to scratch my head and damage the roots. As I was worried that if I did that it would stop hair from growing back.
So, I swapped to moisturizing Shampoo’s and using conditioner all over my hair rather than just the ends as before to try and make it feel less like straw. This helped soothe my scalp and make it less itchy. Especially when it started to grow back and became even more uncomfortable. But I was happy to see and feel something was happening, hoping that it meant that I’d get a full head of hair back eventually.
Thirdly
As I was washing my hair less often I was using dry shampoo in between washes but had stopped using aerosol dry shampoo. It was gritty and the force of the spray might aggravate my scalp and damage my hair even more.
It has a lovely subtle fresh grapefruit and lime scent and also helped me create a bit of volume when I had none. I still use it now as the bottle is going such a long way and don’t plan on going back to aerosol dry shampoos when my hair is eventually fully grown and back in a healthy condition as I prefer it so much more. It took a bit of getting used to but it’s now just as quick and easy to use.
Fourthly
As I said before, the hair got drier. The new hair I have just about reach my eyebrow but the rest of it that had grown whilst I was ill and hadn’t fallen out was just like straw. Meaning that even when I was able to start using heat styling tools, very sparingly, that it looked awful. When I do use heat styling tools I apply heat protect ant, and try to air dry it when I’m curling or straightening it.
I did only curl it for a while as I found it gave me more volume and helped cover up the fact that I had hardly any hair. I even got compliments on my hair and my family and friends couldn’t tell how bare my head actually was.
But Coconut Oil has been the best hair mask, making my hair soft again and better than any conditioner I’d tried or hair mask I’d used before. I wrote about that here if you’d like to read how I use it.
Fifthly and Lastly
Even when I’ve styled it nowadays to make it look better I still have lots of little hairs sticking straight up or out. It got on my nerves.
My hair was looking worse at one point because of the dramatically different lengths in my hair and I plucked up the courage to go to the hairdressers. They deal with people with lots of different hair and health concerns so I really needn’t have worried. They were great and worked with what I had and made it look so much better.
When I spoke to her about the new little hairs sticking up she recommended using a big fluffy makeup brush and spraying a little hairspray onto it. Then using it to gently brush the hairs so they didn’t stick up so much. It doesn’t eradicate the problem but it certainly makes a big difference. Which I was very thankful for.
It has taken me a long time to finally write this. As you can probably understand that it is a difficult subject to discuss. But I hope that if you’re looking for hair care ideas or are losing or regrowing your hair that this helps you in some way.
I know that I’d have liked to have found a post about this to help me 9 months ago. If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I’ll try my best to answer your question.
