Alopecia Areata: Faith, Hair, and A Girl (#1)



Age 5



The youngest has given me permission to share her story, and share her story I will. It's a story of loss and faith and hair. In fact, on the outside, it is mostly about hair, but when you look closer, you'll see it's more about faith. The faith of a child.

And alopecia areata.

That's unexplained baldness to you and me.

Her story will take more than one post, that's for sure. I'm gonna get her to write at least one entry herself. She's a writer, that one. There's also the viewpoint from her granny and her second grade teacher and her brothers and her dad. You see, what affected one affected us all.

The picture above is a bit deceiving. Once when we shared her testimony with an evangelist, he wanted to publish her story if we had pictures of the before and after. Now I'm not knocking the man... his preaching and words of faith played a big part in the young lady we see today, but pictures of the before we just don't have. Pictures of bandanas and scarves and hats we have (and boy, did we ever have a collection!), but pictures of baldness we did not take. I have no regrets there. Besides, photographs fade; memories do not.

In the beginning, though, we didn't need many scarves. In fact, I think the bandana she is wearing in the picture above was just one of a few. It started off pretty mild. She was four when we first noticed an eyebrow missing. Gone. Completely vanished. Then we saw thinning eyelashes and the slight receding of the hairline. A dime-sized bald spot on the left side of her scalp sent us to the doctor who sent us to a specialist. The specialist sent us to a medical college where a group of learning students requested our permission to perform a biopsy on the bald spot because a brain tumor was a possible explanation for the unexplained loss of hair.

We never went back.

What we did do was take her immediately to our pastor, who along with another pastor and a mighty prayer warrior, surrounded that little girl, anointed her with oil, and prayed against whatever affliction was in the process of attacking her. If you look really close in the above picture, you can see the eyebrow in question filling back in (and the other one was oddly never affected). It wasn't too long after this picture that she went without a bandana because all signs of hair loss were practically gone.

And it would stay that way for another year or so, but like most challenges in life, the problem would come back with a vengeance. We had no idea how many scarves and bandanas and hats we would eventually need.

Or how many prayers and boxes of kleenex and pep talks it would take.

Interested?

Watch for the same title in future posts.

We'll see where this little journey takes us.