Meghan Kita was only 23 when it happened. She had been watching an episode of Mad Men and idly scratching her head when her hand suddenly came in contact with skin, not hair.
Kita remembers pausing her show, heading to her bathroom, and taking out a pocket mirror to inspect the back of her head.
That was when she began to panic.
On the back of her head, there was a bald patch as large as a fifty-cent piece, surrounding on all sides by otherwise healthy, undamaged, shoulder-length hair.
Kita immediately picked up the phone to call her mom, who could barely understand what Kita was saying. She was so upset, she was barely comprehensible.
Because Kita had no clue when, how, or why the bald patch cropped up, she didn’t know how to handle it. So she waited until the next day, and then searched her head for more bald patches.
There was another patch just behind her right ear, of approximately the same size.
Desperate for answers – her dermatology appointment wasn’t until the following week – Kita turned to Google. She quickly discovered that her symptoms pointed toward her having alopecia arenta, an autoimmune disease that causes hair on the scalp and the body to fall out.
This disease lacks a clear cause. Health experts currently speculate that this condition is caused by genetics, others surmise that alopecia arenta might be caused by a virus or stressful lifestyle.
When Kita finally saw her dermatologist, she received reassuring news that helped assuage the worries that had cropped up when she completed her own research on Google.
Severe cases of alopecia arenta have to be treated with corticosteroid injections and topical treatments, but Kita’s case was mild enough that the hair was already growing back on its own.
Until the hair came back in full, the dermatologist suggested Kita use DermMatch, a product that could color the bald spots on a person’s scalp, and then hairspray, to keep the short hairs flat until they grew out.
Although Kita’s case was relatively easy to handle, her condition shares a similarity with everyone else’s – it can come back and strike at any time.
Kita takes great care to inspect her scalp regularly and even employs her husband and hairdresser to double check.
Thankfully, since she first discovered that she had this condition six years ago, Kita hasn’t had any bad flare ups and is now intensely grateful for her hair. She relishes every good and bad hair day because she’s just grateful to have it there.
