February was a great month for project repair as our first patient finally received his treatment. I first announced Project Repair back in October, 2015 and it was immediately received with accolades and praise, mainly because of the doctors that are participating are such high caliber and have selflessly taken this project seriously. Hair transplant repair patients now have a option if they cannot afford proper hair transplant repair work on their own.
This first of hopefully many hair transplant repair patients that has been accepted into Project Repair is in the United Kingdom and he had so many hair transplant surgeries that he says he has actually forgotten how many he's had in total. The first few procedures were not what he was told they would be with regards to naturalness and density so, like so many other hair transplant repair patients, he continued to have more surgeries in order to correct the previous attempts to meet his goals. Each surgery required another until he was finally told that his donor zone was depleted and no further surgeries should be attempted. I believe all of his surgeries were FUE surgeries and they represent why FUE can be a bad procedure as the growth was never as good as it should have been and what hairs did grow were not natural in appearance. FUE is a great procedure overall but, just like FUSS surgery, you need to do your research to find the best FUE hair transplant surgeons available.
Hair Transplant Repair Patients
As the administrator of Project Repair all of the applications come through me and then I work with the doctors to find a solution. This patient was referred to the program by my very good friend David Anderson. You may know him on the forums as "Garageland". He was performing consultations in London when he met the patient that I'm discussing and he too felt that the donor area left much to be desired and the results in the hairline and the top of his scalp were sub-par. Unfortunately the patient told David that he could not afford very much and this is when David told the patient about Project Repair.
The patient sent me his photos and filled out the application telling me more about his case. His photos showed that his donor zone did indeed look thinned out from the many FUE surgeries he had gone through in order to achieve his goals. He never felt he would become a hair transplant repair patient but then again, none of us ever did in the beginning. The patient had a lot of area to cover and so the goal was not to add more hair but rather to return him to a state of normalcy. The #1 goal of any hair transplant patient should be to first regain a natural appearance. This does not by default mean that the patient should try and throw more hair at the problem because that only compounds the issue. Repair patients should sometimes consider hair transplant reversal because that is the only way they will look normal and natural again. If this goal is achieved THEN they can consider adding more hair again but in many cases this is a bad idea.
I discussed this patient's needs with each of the Hair Transplant Mentor™ partner doctors and decided that hair transplant doctor Dr. Emre Karadeniz in Istanbul would be the best doctor for this patient. The factors that played into this decision were scheduling, Dr. Karadeniz's experience with similar cases and the patient expressed an interest in Dr. Karadeniz as well so it all worked out. The dates were set and the plan was established. However, once the patient arrived in Istanbul and met Dr. Karadeniz something unusual was noted about the patient's donor zone. It did not appear to be very depleted and it was Dr. Karadeniz's opinion that the patient was an excellent candidate for FUSS. How could this be? What could we have overlooked in the photos? The only thing I didn't see, or consider, was the patient's donor laxity. I didn't consider it because the plan was to simply fill in some of the FUE extraction points with beard hair FUE and to remove some of the offending grafts from the patient's hairline and mid-scalp in order to "erase" the previous work as much as possible. Dr. Karadeniz saw more options and potential once the patient arrived so the game plan was discussed and then changed based this new information.
The patient wound up getting, I believe, close to 2600 grafts to camouflage the old work and Dr. K believes that there is more work that can be done, Below are the three videos that the patient volunteered to take part in so that others may learn from his experience. Project Repair does not require such participation, in video or in any other medium to be considered as a potential candidate. The videos were the patient's idea.
Part I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuL8-mahRbI
Part II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWY76rJPVRE
Part III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-KVEvFS_X4
