I went to see Dr Villnow in Belgium in January this year and I’m at five months after the operation now.
The operation took 4 days. 3 days of scalp hair grafts and 1 day of body hair grafts.
The result is amazing because I’ve gone from a Norwood 6 no-hoper to a full head of hair.
His team were great, really experienced but the doctor himself was always there and he did most of the work himself. The team mainly helped out with placing the grafts afterwards.
The reason I chose Dr Villnow is because of his experience. He’s been doing it for more than twenty years. Also I knew he did FUT, FUE and body hair transplants and I knew I needed a lot of grafts.
I didn’t want to go for FUT because I didn’t want a scar so we went for as many FUE grafts as we could and as many body hair grafts as we could.
The other thing was that I wanted to have it all done in one go. Dr Villnow suggested a 4 day operation with 3500 grafts from the head and 1000 grafts from the body. In the end my donor area had 3400 grafts and the body hair grafts got up to 800 but that was enough. In four straight days, it was over.
Another reason I went to him was his price. His prices for scalp FUE were the best I could find. I knew the body hair grafts would be more expensive but he was still cheaper than other surgeons I spoke to in Belgium, Germany and Holland.
Here are photos before the operation started:
You can really see how bad I was from these photos. I ha no hair at all on my head, just wisps, a Norwood 6.
Now these pictures are from the first day of the operation.
The first day was the longest. We started at 0730 and it went on all day. Dr Villnow and his team extracted and placed 2000 grafts that day.
Here are some more photos from the first day:
With these two photos you can really see where the donor area on the sides of my head was operated on.
Here’s another photo from the first day.
You can see the job isn’t done yet but most of the front was covered.
Now the second day was the body hair day. I have to say that this was not pain-free. The painkiller injections into my chest were more painful than the ones into my head and I thought that the extraction was painful.
Dr Villnow did this part all by himself and in the head he gave me some medicine to calm me down. After that it was ok but I’m glad I don’t have to do it again but it was definitely worth it.
Here are the photos from the second day:
You can see where the grafts were taken from my chest. You can also see where the body hairs were placed. They were placed on the back of my head to pack out the crown.
Now here are the photos from Day 3. The last two days were all scalp FUE and used to fill out the back of my head.
And now here are the photos on the last day of the operation. All the grafts are in place. 4200 grafts in four days.
The operation finished at 1500 on the last day and I had a good rest. On the next day I already travelled home.
The clinic gave me painkillers, pillows and plenty of advice.
I had taken some time off work (one week) and I let myself recover.
I knew the hairs would fall out after a while and it started after about ten days. I know this is normal but it was still sad to see them start to fall out.
It tooks months before they came back and when they did, I took another set of photos. Here they are:
These photos are at five months after the operation so the hairs are very young. I am very, very happy with this operation and I will keep putting up some more photos soon.
Thank you for reading my journal and please let me know what you think. Thank you.