MY HEAD, PLUS CHRISTMAS SPICE MOCHI BREAD BABKA

I guess, the whole thing began when my dog-son Dumpling passed away about twelve months ago.  I always knew such event was going to be big, like never-forget-it big, like scar-big.  But I never could foresee the events that it triggered.  In exactly 2 months after the heartbreak, my hair started to fall out in abnormal quantity.  I didn’t pay much attention to it then because after all, I was on a rebound-vacation in europe and I wasn’t gonna let anything distract me from cheap Jamón ibérico.  But in January, after I returned to my then-home Beijing and resumed to my lovely, hypochondriac self, it cook no time to secure my upmost attention along with three dermatologist’s appointments.  Of course, after a couple of blood test on iron deficiency and thyroid functions, all of them assured me that it was just an episode of TE, a temporary hair-shedding followed by traumatic events, then sent me home to rekindle with hairs caught in the shower drainage.

To be honest, and I must clarify, the shedding wasn’t that bad or noticeable to others.  What was really bothering me, pinning me down to the ground and halting my enthusiasms in all aspects of life, was this ghost-like pain on the upper part of my scalp.  Ah yes… the pain.  This burning, prickling, hypersensitive and maddening pain.  It wasn’t “excruciating”, no, wasn’t severe enough to fiddle with any doctor’s curiosity except for my own sanity, and it wasn’t constant either, drifting in and out, sometimes lasting for days then gone, but only to return at any signs of good spirits then snipped them in the buds.  It wasn’t the source of my distress.  That would be vanity.  After all, it was hair.  But it made overcoming my fear that much harder.  It disallowed me to forget, to stop obsessing.  It’s hard to admit, but it crippled me.  It rubbed my face down close to the shame of depression.  I never knew it was that easy.

Informations, for better or worse, are abundant nowadays.  I Googled the shit out of this.

As if obsession wasn’t enough, I threw in my best pessimism for good measure, and fixated on the worst case scenario in the long list of suspects.  Something called, scarring alopecia.  It’s an autoimmune condition without cure or known cause, triggering the body to attack on its own hair follicles, resulting in permanent hair loss in affected areas.  The only definitive diagnosis is made by surgical scalp biopsy.  It’s rare.  It’s brutal.  It’s super depressing.  It’s right up my alley.  I must had it.  Yes.  That was it.

Except, not a single trained professional agreed.

No matter.  In late March, after we moved back to Hong kong, it was like a heavenly door opening to a frontier of brand new doctors.  I was like a kid in the candy store.  I scouted around town and hunted down two more dermatologists and held them hostages, forcing them to draw my bloods.  Both blood tests, one on zinc, and another one on more severe autoimmune diseases (such as lupus) came back negative (scarring alopecia does not show up in blood tests).  Needless to say, none of the doctors recommended, one of them plainly discarded, the prospect of a biopsy.  I don’t blame them, because truth was, I did not (still don’t) resemble any clinical signs of scarring alopecia, the patchy, angry and visibly inflamed scalp, the real hairs in need.  Instead, my diffuse and not-so-obvious thinning suggested derangement.  Even the pain, my only ally, proved to be undependable to show up on time during appointments.

So another five months passed.  I mastered meditation and was about to call it a year.  But another obsessing opportunity came up where Kitchenaid invited me to New York – the base camp of SEAL Team 6 of medical elites – to celebrate their new mini mixer, and little did they know, I took another dermatologist as collateral damage.  But this time, it was different.  The specialist I saw reignited my belief that I had this condition.  He told me that he had seen a patient in my suspected case and suggested that I do a biopsy by a student of his in Taiwan (because I wasn’t going to stay in New York).  Three weeks later, quarter inch deep and two stitches wide, I did.  And in another two weeks, the result came back positive.  I have scarring alopecia.