Karly Smith of Auckland has been keeping a painful secret under her hat – she’s losing her hair.
I woke to see my Dad leaning over me. It was barely light outside. “Karly, come with me, there’s something I want to show you,” he said.
Whatever Dad had to tell me, I didn’t want to hear it. “Go away,” I told him. “No,” he said firmly. “You can’t pretend this isn’t happening. It’s affecting all of us.” He took me into his office. As soon as I saw the pictures on the computer I started to cry.
Bald women, women with giant clumps of hair missing, their scared eyes staring out at me or smiling at the camera, as if their hair loss didn’t matter. Dad gently touched my elbow. “What’s happening to you is awful, Karly – but you’re not the only girl in the world experiencing it. Look.”
And so, at 6am in the morning, my father forced me to confront the awful, obvious secret I had been hiding under hats and bandannas for months. I was 17 – and going bald. It started in June. I was looking in the bathroom mirror and suddenly caught a glimpse of something on the side of my head. Hidden under my hair was a bald patch the size of a 10-cent piece. I was shocked.
I ran into the living room screaming “Which one of you shaved my head?” I thought it was a prank played on me while I was sleeping. It wasn’t. It got worse. Each morning I’d lock myself in my bedroom and comb my hair with shaking hands. I was hoping that whatever was happening to me had stopped.
But every day large clumps of hair would come out with the comb. I dreaded showering and the feeling of hair slithering down my back with the water. Afterwards, I’d scoop it out of the drain. There was too much to flush down the toilet so I’d hide it in my towel and smuggle it to my bedroom and into the rubbish bin.
I’d come out of my bedroom wearing a hat and go to work feeling miserable. I refused to talk about it. But I couldn’t hide what was happening. one day I was in the park with friends and my hat came off. I quickly pulled it back on, my cheeks burning with shame. No one said anything. I didn’t know what to say either. It was surreal.
But that night, my boyfriend Blake came to visit me. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked gently. I simply shook my head. I was sure he was going to dump me – his bald girlfriend. one morning when I was heading out in my hat, oum stopped me: “Karly? You can see the bald patches at the back now,” she said. “We need to do something about this.”
But I just ran out the door and drove to work crying. With oum and Dad’s support, I finally went to see an alopecia specialist, only to learn that when it comes to treating female hair loss, it’s all pretty much guesswork, especially when tests couldn’t confirm anything wrong with me.
I went on steroids – they didn’t work. We changed my diet – that didn’t work. Someone suggested rubbing half an onion on my scalp every morning – yeah, right!
“We need to get you a wig, Karly,” oum said finally. Reluctantly, I settled on a shoulder- length, sandy-blonde wig. It cost a small fortune and I hated it. It wasn’t my hair. It was something fake.
For a month it just sat on the polystyrene head in my room. I was sure if I put it on that everyone would know straight away I had a wig on. I hate the word “wig”. It makes me think of an old man with a plastic-looking toupee flapping in the wind. But 17-year-old girls like me, who just want to feel pretty, wear them too.
It wasn’t until my Dad woke me up that morning that I realised I had to deal with my alopecia. So I decided to shave my head. one morning, I sneaked into my sister Cindy’s room with a pair of clippers and woke her up by buzzing them right next to her face. She understood immediately. As she ran the clippers over my head, we talked, sister to sister.
“Babe, you’ve got an amazing life,” she told me. “You’ve got a gorgeous boyfriend who loves you, a great job and lots of friends. Don’t let this one, bad thing ruin the rest of your life – because that’s what you’re letting happen.”
It was tough love but it was exactly what I needed to hear. As the remains of my hair fell to the bathroom floor, I realised she was right. I needed to keep living my life. It hasn’t been easy.
I still don’t have the confidence to go out much and to be honest, I’m freaking out about summer. Even though I’m used to the wig now, it gets so hot and scratchy in the sun.
People tell me I’m brave but I rarely feel that way. Some days I feel pretty cowardly but on other days I actually do feel strong and determined. I wonder if every 17-year-old girl feels this way – whether she has hair or not? As told to Max Currie
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