I’m now back in the UK, having had my hair transplant with Dr Feller on 17th July.
I decided to make a holiday of it and spent a few days in Manhattan beforehand. For those doing likewise, it’s easy to get to Great Neck by the Long Island Rail Road, which sounds delightfully Mark Twain but in fact is a bit like First Capital Connect. The night before the procedure I stayed at the Andrew Hotel, which is perfectly serviceable and a very short taxi ride from Dr Feller’s office.
Anyone who has received Dr Feller’s instructions for the big day will have been left in little doubt about the doctor’s views on arriving late. So, having set alarms on my phone and my BlackBerry and arranging a wake-up call for good measure (yes, I know) I arrived at Dr Feller’s office on Northern Boulevard – a sort of cross between Harley Street and the M4 – at 7.30 sharp. Dr Feller arrived very shortly afterwards and we had a good chat about my hair loss and what I wanted to achieve. We agreed that the doctor would pack the grafts into the crown, where the hair loss was most severe, leaving the possibility of a second procedure, further front, down the line. I was also told that the skin around the donor site was particularly well suited to trycophytic closure, which was one of those rare occasions where you don’t know whether to say “thank you” or “you’re welcome”.
I’ll say from the outset that Dr Feller is instantly likeable and positively exudes professionalism. He manages to combine a sense of humour that I think I can uncontroversially label ‘quirky’ with a very straightforward approach, and has a great bedside manner that puts patients (well, me, at any rate) very much at ease. It’s abundantly clear that he takes a great deal of pride in his work, and this shows in every aspect of the procedure.
Dr Feller then took some photos and started drawing the pattern of his proposed transplant on my scalp. Once he was satisfied with his work, I was led into a room with what looked like a massage chair – but something told me I wasn’t about to get a massage. Call it intuition. Call it precognition. Call it the fact that the doctor was brandishing a hypodermic syringe. At any rate, I lay prostrate on the chair, my head was held down (was I about to be water-boarded?) and Dr Feller proceeded to numb the donor area. Believe me when I say that this was the only painful part of the whole procedure, and it was really nothing too terrible and can’t have lasted more than 30 seconds. And I am, it has to be said, hardly Jack Bauer.
Then I was led into another room with what looked like a dentist’s chair. But by this time I had learned that appearances of furniture can be deceiving in Great Neck. Another series of injections (this time painless) and Dr Feller got to work. I felt the slightly disconcerting (but, again, entirely painless) sensation of Dr Feller cutting out a strip in the donor area, the familiar feeling of the incision being sewn up and the novel but oddly recognisable sensation of staples being punched into the back of my head.
Dr Feller then made numerous tiny incisions in my scalp and his team of technicians then started to insert the grafts (or ‘place’, as I believe was the technical term). Now, Dr Feller gets a good deal of praise, and deservedly so; but perhaps not enough is said about his technicians. They were, without exception, friendly, dedicated and highly professional, and worked very well as a team. There were three rounds of the incision/placing routine in total – the last round was to insert just short of 100 grafts that remained after the original crown pattern had been filled. This, I think, demonstrates Dr Feller’s attention to detail and commitment to achieving the best possible results – the extra grafts will have had little or no impact in terms of fees (and, frankly, I wouldn’t have known if he had flushed them down the toilet), but he was determined that none of the grafts he had extracted should be wasted. All-in-all, I think I received about 2,000 grafts.
At the end of the procedure, Dr Feller took some more photos and then talked me through the ‘before and after’ shots and what he’d done. I must say it looked mighty impressive to my untrained eye. Dr Feller then gave me a Vicodin, which is apparently a narcotic, and enough spares to last either a few days or one very energetic evening. And with that, I left, looking a bit Death of Marat. If Marat had also been wearing an I Love NY baseball cap when he was bumped off.
I took a taxi back to Manhattan ($75). From the look on the taxi driver’s face, being asked to drive from Great Neck to Manhattan is a bit like being asked to drive south of the river in London after 10pm. Safely back in the hotel, I took another Vicodin as instructed; an infrequent and inexperienced opium eater, this all proved a little alien to my system and I was briefly reunited with my lunch. I immediately swore off the Vicodin (thus ending probably the shortest experiment with narcotics in history) and since then have managed to get by with plain old paracetamol.
The journey back was pleasantly hassle-free. At JFK security I just removed my cap without being prompted, stepped through the metal detector and replaced the cap at the other end. With hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have said “phew!” at this point, but you live and learn. I didn’t even bother removing my cap at the UK border, although the official did give me a very long, very strange stare before eventually permitting me to re-enter the UK.
And that’s that, I suppose. It’s now four days after the procedure, the redness in the recipient site has gone down nicely and I haven’t had to take more than about four painkillers since the night of the transplant. Now the waiting begins. Even before seeing any results, I don’t think I could have asked for a higher quality, friendlier service than I received from Dr Feller and his team – and I usually find fault with everything.
