Jane gets herself into a hairy-hairy situation

I’ve treated you guys to rants when a business does something lousy, so here’s a time they did something nice and I was the scary customer.

—

After Kiddo4, my hair stopped growing. It’s never been amazing hair, but it used to grow at the regular rate and I could donate it every two years. Well, I had K4 and it stopped.

I waited.

And waited.

Waited some more. Meanwhile, hair kept falling out, and I was no longer a hairy-hairy.

I mentioned it a doctor visit for something else, and the doctor said, “Probably hormones.”

We moved. Changed doctors. New doctor: “Probably age.”

My dermatologist office has a policy that every six months you must give them a co-payment, which they facilitate by having you come in for a “skin check.” At the “skin check” I said, “My hair stopped growing,” and the doctor said, “Oh, that’s fine. We’ll just check your vitamin D, thyroid, riboflavin, spark plugs, torque, ink levels…”

He sent me to the lab with a ream of paper, where the tech sighed, looked at me sadly, and reached for a gallon of milk. She proceeded to pour it all down the sink, then began filling it with my blood.

“You’re going to leave some?” I said.

She glanced at the paperwork. “Maybe.”

After the exsanguination, all my blood work came back at normal levels, but two years later, my hair still wasn’t growing more than an inch or two a year. But proving we live in a fallen world, the ends were splitting, and I needed to get it trimmed.

At the salon, I told the stylist my tale of woe. “So whatever you do,” I said, “I’ll be wearing it for two years.”

At the end of the trim, she said, “Biotin.”

I said, “Okay.”

I love researching weird naturopathic drug-free remedies. Instead I walked across the street to CVS, bought a bottle of the stuff, and took it in the mornings.

A month later, I had a little halo of hair. A month after that, I could see my eyelashes were longer. Yay!

I had to say thank you.

But that required talking to people. And talking to people… {shudder}

I thought about going over to the salon with a box of donuts, or maybe a DD gift card. But then I thought, these are stylists; they appreciate beauty. So I came up with a Plan. A glorious Plan. The kind of Plan that makes the household guardian angels put on armor and try to call in sick.

[to be continued]