The Old, Weird, Raging Side of my Head

The left side of my head has gone very strange. When I was just 24 years old, I discovered grey hairs up there. I still remember the horror of that realization: I was staring into the small mirror in the small bathroom under the creaky stairs of the old house in Harrisburg where I had recently moved. I pulled them with a morbid fascination, and they would just come out, that easy--wiry, tough, silvery-blond, streaking back like a moonbeam of doom along the left front of my head.

I called Mom in a panic and told her I had a grey streak, and reminded her I was only 24 years old. She asked what side of my head it was on, and I told her. Apparently it was hereditary. "Ah, the McKean streak," she said, as if that made it all okay that the vicissitudes of Time had already clamped their hoary hands upon my young brow.

Over the years I have grown to accept and even like the grey streak. It has stayed only a streak, and sometimes looks blond. Josh likes it, as it reminds him of Rogue from X-Men. I appreciate it as a means of vexing my manipulative hairstylist, who continually attempts to a sell me on more expensive hair appointments, and I have been successful in putting him off these past 2 years.

What I have not grown to accept is the "weird" manifestations on the left side of my head. There are two--one is quite benign; the other far more malignant and menacing. The benign oddity is a little tuft of hair that refuses to grow more than about 3 inches long. It stubbornly trails down the left side of my neck when I wear my hair in a pony tail, too short to make it up into the hair tie, and too weird to curl prettily. It just hangs there, like an askew rat-tail on scrawny little boy from the '80s.

As for the malignant oddity--I had thought that going grey at age 24 was bad enough, but I certainly, in my wildest nightmares, had not banked on going bald at 29. Yes, it's true--I have lost a significant amount of hair on the left side of my head.

It was two days before Valentine's Day, and I was blow-drying my hair. Josh was playing soccer. I had brushed the left side of my hair straight up to dry it, trying to avoid the annoying natural curl that tends to spring up along the sides if I don't dry it vigilantly, and I was shocked to find an expanse of pallid white skin stretching up above my ear where hair should be. I checked bilaterally (a phrase I learned in Sports Medicine in high school), and sure enough, the right side of my head had hair all the way down to and around the ear. My left ear sat with its head utterly exposed, surrounded by an island of baby smooth, heartbreakingly hairless skin.

I didn't know what to do, other than text Josh and ask him if he would still love me if I went totally bald on one side of my head (which I'm sure has been cataloged with other of my "crazy wife" texts/voicemails). Then I went to the mall and started buying things, all the while haunted by a windy feeling above my left ear.

After weeks of moaning like a banshee over every long curly hair hanging ominiously from the bookcase or the couch or nestled in the sink, I eventually chatted with my doctor about it, and sure enough, it was certainly not an uneven bilateral hairline, like I hoped. The diagnosis was "alopecia areata," a result of my Hashimoto's thyroiditis (it would, of course, be named after a Japanese man), wherein the world's most idiotic immune system has gone beserk against our own perfectly healthy body tissues. Apparently my very own asinine but unfortunately well-armed antibodies hurled themselves, giggling and slobbering, into a wild melee against our unsuspecting, outmanned thyroid gland and then turned their clumsy, bloody paws against our very own hair follicles. Friendly fire of the worst kind. Morons. Thus stands my scientific understanding of what has gone on to make me not only dependent on synthetic hormones for the rest of my life but also look like a creepy witch from Roald Dahl's book (my brothers-in-law who are well-learned in the arts of medicine may see cause for correction in my analysis of the situation, but that's the best I can do).

All this leads me to the third adjective--the rage. Apparently the treatment for bald spots is to shoot the head up with corticosteroids. So a few days ago I went to the doctor and sat there while she pumped steroids into my skull. I also have a corticosteroid cream that I get to rub all over my bald spot every morning and night. Now I'm greying, balding, and full of fury like never before. If only I could launch a javelin or two at my misfit antibodies.

*****

JD here. I initially feared what my wife would be transformed into when I heard "steroid injections" -- my initial thought was Starla from Napolean Dynamite ("Forget about it!"). Luckily, I realized that the origin of this fear was some combination of: 1) the fact that Barry Bonds was currently on trial for use of anabolic steroids, thus placing me in that mindset when I heard "steroids"; and 2) my complete ignorance about medical terminology, and medicine in general. Realizing your fears are founded on stupidity rather than reality is ALWAYS a relief.


As for the Rogue from X-Men thing, I was an impressionable 11-year old when the original FOX cartoon came out -- can you blame me?