Hair, Hair Everywhere

Have you heard about how your hair falls out after pregnancy? Goodness gracious, my hair is coming out in handfuls! Apparently, your hair kind of rests while you are pregnant so you lose very little compared to normal. Not as many hairs reach the end of their growing cycle. Then once your hormones begin to return to normal, all that hair you should have lost already falls out.

But it's out of control! Mostly I lose it in the shower (my hair, not my mind). Which is really gross. When I lose hair in the shower it gets all stuck on my hands. I don't want it to clog up the drain so I stick it to the wall and (try to remember to) clean it up after my shower. Gross, I know. Am I the only one who does this?!

While that is the bulk of my hair loss I am also finding it EVERYWHERE. Where else is it, you ask? It is on the kitchen counter. It is on my lab bench and my computer keyboard at work. It's all over my clothes. Don't even look at the bathroom floor after I blowdry. It's all tangled up in my poor baby's hands. You may even find it emerging from the business end of my dogs after they do their duties! They must eat it I guess, hopefully unintentionally. Hey, you asked!

My husband hates finding hair around usually so he is extra disgusted right now. What can I do? Nothing, obviously. I just have to wait until it's done. Which led me to use some super rigorous mathy stuff. I calculated (by mostly making it up) that it should take 66.5 days for all the extra to be gone. What's that, you want me to show my work? Well, I don't know I mean I guess I could but umm... OK! The following is very scientifical:

I think I read somewhere that you typically lose about 100 hairs per day*. Let's assume I lost zero per day during pregnancy (to be conservative). Let's not count those two weeks before ovulation so (38 weeks) x (7 days/week) x (100 hairs/day) = 26,600 hairs I need to shed!

I also read that during this shedding phase you can lose about 500 hairs per day*! So that's my normal 100 + 400 extra. So 26,600 divided by 400 = 65.5 days.

I estimate this has been going on almost a month so hopefully just about one more month. Yuck!

Don't worry about baldness. I have always had a very dense covering of hair. Too bad it's very fine hair that refuses to curl and generally just laughs at me when I try to do anything with it. Sigh. But my widow's peak is looking pretty sparse. I'm sure I'm the only one who notices but it's not cute. Now I fully expect that I will have little baby hairs sticking out of it once it all starts growing back. I'll keep you posted because I know you need to know.

*I have no real reference for you here. These are figures I think I may have read somewhere maybe, once upon a time.