I'm Going Bald

Seriously. Every time I run my hands through my hair I come back with clumps of hair woven through my fingers. In the shower new clumps come out when I wet my hair, when I shampoo my hair, when I rinse my hair, when I condition my hair and when I rinse my hair. You'd think it would all come out with the first shampoo/rinse but no. Every. Single. Time. there are clumps of hair.

This happened to me once before. A few weeks after I stopped breastfeeding Lucas my hair started falling out. After several days of freaking out, I realized that my hair had been incredibly thick and luxurious during my pregnancy. Now that I had stopped breastfeeding my hormones must be returning to normal and thus all that extra hair was coming out. The clumps of hair still freaked me out but I knew there was a reason and I convinced myself that I wasn't really going to go bald.

This time when it started falling out the first thing that crossed my mind was that I was pregnant. Then I realized that if I was pregnant my hair would be getting thicker not thinner. So my next thought was that I had miscarried. About 10 seconds later I realized that was a pretty irrational conclusion as well and that it must be the steriods.

Ah, yes. The steriods. All the yucky side effects of prednisone did come with the semi-positive side effect of making my hair grow longer and faster. I say semi-positive because ALL my hair was growing. Including two wiry chin hairs which I had to pluck on an every-other-day-basis and which made me feel like an old lady. (I am happy to report no more incidences of chin hairs since going off the prednisone.)

So I understand that what is falling out is the extra hair that grew due to the steroids. But, hello, it has now been weeks--weeks!--of no prednisone and it is coming out in an alarming rate and in alarming quantities.

I hope you'll still be my friend when I'm bald.

Prednisone Out!

And in other news...today was my very last day on prednisone!

After 12 weeks and 1 day, I am finally done!

Don't let that good news fool you, though. My platelets are still haywire. After reaching "normal" levels during my week at the beach, they were back down to just-above-critical one week later. Yeah, and I totally asked for a "prescription" to go back to the beach for the rest of the summer. Apparently rest and relaxation (or conversely stress) have no impact on platelet levels. Nor does Vitamin D (I asked all of these questions!).

But, let's focus on the good news: I could officially compete in the Olympics if I wanted to as I am steroid-free! (Yeah, like that was the only thing keeping me from Olympic-level competition. Ha!)