I got up that morning and just decided to do it. I was like, It’s supposed to be 80 degrees outside, it’s hot! I hadn’t done a quick weave for myself, and I didn’t want to wear a wig. I had just shaved my head, and my scalp was smooth. I thought, Yep, this is the day! So I got dolled up and did my makeup, and I said, I’m gonna wear pink underneath my scrubs. And I went to work at the hospital as a certified medical assistant, uncovered.
I was nervous, and I don’t know if it was more so because it was work or if I was more worried about the questions. I wouldn’t have direct contact with patients, so there wouldn’t be a way for patients to even question and go, “Oh, what’s wrong?” I didn’t want the pity. When I got there, one coworker’s face just lit up, and she was like, “My queen! You look amazing!” Some of the doctors came over and said, “You look great!” They didn’t treat me any different like I thought they would. They didn’t throw a bunch of questions at me. I literally made it nine hours with no covering! Afterward, I got in the car and cried a little because it was such a huge milestone.
When my hair first started falling out, I thought, Is it lupus? My doctor started running all these tests. Once that came back negative, he said, “Let’s send you on to dermatology.” I learned that I had end-stage scarring alopecia. I had let it go on for so long, and there was so much inflammation and so much scar tissue that had built up, that it was at the end stages, so regrowth would not be possible. When I got the diagnosis, I remember I sat in the doctor’s office afterward for, like, 20 minutes, and I just cried and cried because I didn’t understand why it was happening to me. I almost fell into a depression. We tried treatments for about a year, and the medications and the treatments helped tame the inflammation, the redness, the burning, the itching. I even had some sores that would scab up and bleed. So the treatments helped with that, but my hair just kept falling out. I immediately went into self-protective mode: I got to hide this. I got to keep people from seeing it.
A delivery man coming to the door would prompt me to hide and cover up before I got the package. It was really hard to wrap my head around the fact that there were patches of hair missing. I tried crochet braids and quick weaves to cover them up, but quick weaves were causing too much of a flare-up. Then I tried wigs. From when I got my diagnosis in 2005 until last year, there was always this fear that people could see the spots and that I didn’t cover it up enough. I was very big on making sure that I was always presentable; I never went out of the house looking any old kind of way. I didn’t want people to stare. I didn’t even want my parents to know.
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