How to Prevent Damaging Grafts Immediately after a Hair Transplant Surgery
I have a couple of questions about sleeping after having a hair transplant.
1. How do you keep your hands from touching the recipient area while comatose?
2. How do you keep from rolling over and sleeping on your stomach or sides?I have a couple of ideas to prevent myself from doing this, but wanted to hear experiences with this.
This hair loss question was answered on our hair restoration forum by Dr. Paul Shapiro of Bloomington, MN who is a member of the Coalition of Independent Hair Restoration Physicians. His professional answer is below.
Rest assured, it is very uncommon to have a hair transplant patient touch or rub their head at night while asleep and damage the newly transplanted hair.
I agree with Dr. Feller’s answer about the subconscious taking over. If you have ever had any other surgery or injury you may notice that it is very uncommon to hurt it in your sleep. Your body knows there is an injury and knows it will be painful to touch it. What we do see in our practice is a patient will accidentally hit their head when they are awake and dislodge some grafts. This is a much larger concern for us then anyone hurting the follicular unit grafts while asleep.
I would not recommend putting any type of dressing on the grafted area. My concern is that the hair grafts could stick to the dressing and come off when removing the dressing.
When hair transplants consisted of larger grafts, many hair loss doctors use to put on occlusive dressings after hair restoration surgery. But with the small follicular unit grafts most doctors got away from using the dressings. Bandaging of the scalp is often more uncomfortable then the pain from the surgery, and it can sometimes block venous and lymphatic drainage. Also, we like to use a spray called “Grafcyte” on the transplant starting right after surgery. “Grafcyte” has copper peptide which can aid in healing and keeps the transplanted area moist.
If you insist on a dressing, let your doctor do it. There is a special non-stick bandage call Telfa which would prevent the grafts from sticking onto the bandage.
As for sleeping on your back: We ask patients to sleep on their back with the head propped up on a few pillows to help the fluids that have accumulated in the scalp during the hair transplant to drain. If one lays on their face or side, the fluid may not drain well and noticeable swelling can occur. Laying on ones back with their head propped up helps reduce the possibility of swelling, but does not eliminate it. If it is difficult for you to sleep on your back or you toss and turn, you may have a greater chance of some post operative swelling, but this does not affect the outcome of the surgery.
As for hitting the grafted area while tossing and turning, it is very difficult. Just try to position yourself in bed so that the typical surgical area is touching the bed/and or pillow and you will find that unless you are a contortionist it is very difficult.
Lastly, there are many medications available to make your first few post operative days comfortable. We give all our patients Vicodin, a strong pain medication which also has a sedative effect. Most hair restoration patients sleep very well when they take Vicodin. For patients in which anxiety may make it difficult for them to sleep I will prescribe Xanax, or Valium.
Lastly we always offer our hair transplant patients a follow up visit the next day. We will do the first hair wash and make sure all the grafts are snugly in place.
I hope this information is helpful.
Paul Shapiro, MD
—
Bill
Associate Publisher of the Hair Transplant Network and the Hair Loss Learning Center
View my Hair Loss Weblog
Technorati Tags: hair transplant, hair loss, hair transplant, transplanted hair, follicular unit grafts, hair grafts, hair transplants, hair loss, hair restoration, Grafcyte, copper peptide
April 9, 2012 @ 7:28 pm
Luan,
By three weeks, your grafts are fully anchored and you really can’t dislodge any permanent hairs. Additionally, the “rule of thumb” for graft dislodging is seeing the presence of blood with a hair falling out (meaning if you don’t see blood when you lose the hair, you probably didn’t lose an implanted graft).
Altogether, it seems like you’re okay.
I hope this helps!
Blake (Future_HT_Doc)
Editorial Assistant
April 6, 2012 @ 5:36 am
I had hair transplant about three weeks ago. I started to pick the scabs and alot of hair fall off. Is this normal? How do I know if i damage the graft?
February 27, 2012 @ 4:32 pm
I had an hair transplant a week back. The graftcyte pads were applied on top of my head and a a bandage to the sides of my head which had a gel in it. The medical assistant informed me to remove the graftcyte pads after 45 mins after the surgery. But instead of saying “remove only the graftcyte pads” she told me to remove all the blue materials in the head and unfortunately the bandage with the gel was also blue so i pulled it out after just 45 mins. When i went in the next day they were astonished that i had pulled out the bandage and one or two hair folicles were out which were put back in by one of the medical assitants.I also looked at the bandage to see if any follicles were attached to the bandage but did not find any. So my question is what are possibility of me losing some follicles because of my mistake of pulling the bandage out too early and also if i have not lost any can i have weakened them so that i might lose them in the near future? i became paranoid when i went in to get my suture removed today because all the medical assitant remembered that i had removed my bandage and one of them informed me that they all talked about it at length.
December 8, 2011 @ 4:27 am
Robert,
Of course, applying this type of force to the newly transplanted grafts in the first days after hair transplant surgery is never a good idea. However, if your actions did not induce new bleeding then you probably did not lose a graft but only a hair follicle. It’s perfectly normal for these newly transplanted hair follicles to shed.
If, in the worst case, you lost a single follicular unit graft in the hairline it is unlikely to negatively impact the final result of your hair restoration surgery. However, I do recommend discussing your concerns with your hair transplant surgeon.
David (TakingThePlunge)
December 7, 2011 @ 1:12 pm
I just had a hair transplant procedure performed on 12-06-11. I wa given one of those surgical caps to wear on my head to help shield my scalp, but my scalp was still bleeding a little. I went to sleep with the cap on and woke up the next day trying to remove the cap. I could not remove the front part of the cap because the blood had dried up and become stuck to some of the areas where the grafts had been put in. I tried pulling gently on the cap that was stuck to the area where some of my grafts where placed and managed to pull it off but it came off with a good amount of scab and what I believe to be a single hair follicle. Now I am worried that I ruined my hair line and the surgeon may not be able to do anything about it. Is it possible to have another hair follicle out in to replace the one that i accidently removed?