Hello everyone,

I have been reading these message boards since 2004. It was the information I learned here, and the images posted that made me comfortable enough to eventually travel to India to have some work done by Dr A and his team.

I was Dr A's last patient of 2006. Over the course of 5 days, we did about 5900 grafts from my chest/stomach, legs, and scalp. We mixed all this hair together in mostly a 1:1:1 ratio. I'll let Dr A post the revelent pictures, and add his comments.

Overall, I was very impressed with Dr A and his staff. Everyone is very talented, and very hard working. Unfortunately I did not get the chance to meet Dr San, as she was away. However, I did get to meet Dr Ruby, who was very nice.

Many members of Dr A's team work on you at once. The newer members of the staff have the much easier jobs, while the staff that have been with him many years do the extractions, and some of the placements. Dr A makes all the recipient sites. He also closely monitors the procedure.

I went back to work 17 days after the last day of the procedure, and there were almost no signs that any work had been done. I buzzed down my hair before I went back to work, and if you looked really closely, you could barely see some of the extraction sites on the scalp, but noone noticed.

The body donor areas are healing more slowly. My chest and stomach look good. But my legs are taking a longer time to heal. I still have bruising on my legs, but it sesems to be very slowly getting better. I would appreciate comments on this from Dr A. Is there anything I should be doing to help the bruises go away faster, etc. etc...

I was somewhat of a unique patient in a couple ways:

For one, the Xylocaine wore off on my very fast. Dr A told me that out of all his patients, it wore off the fastest on me.

Also, the little IV sedative they give you in the mornings did nothing for me, and we had to add Alprax (Xanax) by mouth in the mornings and at lunch. Once we figured that out, I was very comfortable for the rest of the week. In general, most medications seem to wear off very quickly on me.

All in all, I am very happy that I decided to go to Dr A's clinic. The staff, and work done exceeded my expectations. They even got me at the hotel every morning and walked me across the street because I felt like I would have gotten hit by a car. Even though it's a side street, it is impossible to cross.

Choosing Dr. A was a tuff decision, especially since I feel that most of the doctors who post on this site are very talented. Here are a few of the reasons why I chose Dr A and his team.

1. He personally responded to all of my e-mails/questions.

2. He was confident that even though I was NW 5-6, I could achieve good results.

3. He had enough staff to get the work done in 5 days, and only 7-8 hours a day. This was very important to me, as I get very restless after so many hours.

4. After narrowing it down to a few of the doctors (all from this site), Dr A's rates offered me the number of grafts I needed, at a price I could afford.

5. Dr A had a very good plan with mixing the body hair and scalp hair together, in specific ratios.

6. I like to buzz the sides and back of my head with a #000 blade. I can still do this because of the very tiny extraction sites. This was also very important to me.

Here are some pictures of the transplant posted by Dr. Arvind:

Needle juxtaposed in these pictures is gauge 24 (0.55mm diameter).

Picture of my thigh donor area

Here Dr. Arvind mentioned :

"You may note that he has left approx. 1 sq cm of the hair untrimmed and unshaved. This helps us determine the characteristics of the body donor hair in its original location.
The alternative is to collect samples of the shaven hair from different areas and paste them on a piece of paper and label them.

I feel it is less cumbersome for the patients if they follow the first approach, as farscalpe has done, instead of the 2nd."

The picture that follows is a random one of some of the thigh hair grafts, after they were extracted and before they were trimmed.

Pictures (before)

Pictures (intraoperative) : Recipient area pictures.

Detailed forum discussion for these pics can be found at:
http://www.hairsite4.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=12&topic_id=50321&mode=full