Your Pictures Are Too Bloody

I noticed that many of the photos show red head where the transplants are. Is that what I am going to look like and have to walk around with?

The pictures we show that are ‘bloody’ red or pink, reflect the time that they were taken (usually minutes after the surgery). Most are in the first 24 hours after the surgery when we have access to the patients. After that, the patients wash their own hair and the pinkness goes away faiirly quickly. What I mean by fairly quickly is that most people with dark, medium, or olive skin color rarely show any red color within 24-48 hours of the transplant. People with very fair, pale skin tend to show more pink or red in the wounds, but these people fall into two categories:

1. The first are the people who have what I am going to call ‘Histamine’ positive skin. These pale skinned people tend to develop redness in any scratch or trauma to the skin. They store higher amounts of the chemical Histamine at the ends of nerves which release to cause vaso-dilitation of the blood vessels. If you are one of these people, you can easily see it, just by taking your fingernail and scratching your arm. The people who are Histamine positive will develop a red-streak within a minute of the finger nail scratch. When we know that people are in this category, I treat them with two medications to minimize the redness and how long it lasts.
2. The second group of people are those who are not Histamine positive and they will respond like all other people with the redness or pinkness gone in just a day or two.

If you come to one of our open house events, we usually have someone there who had surgery earlier in the week. This allows you to see the post operative wound and the issue of social detectability, within a week of surgery.