Dear Doctor

"Oh help me, please, doctor, I'm damaged..." - The Rolling Stones, the anti-Beatles.

I used to consider the instruments at right, barbaric. To clarify, at face value, they seem pedestrian, ordinary medical tools. But it's where they go that gives them their Dark Ages flair: up my nose. If you've seen Total Recall, that's what were talking about here. Last July, I underwent nasal surgery to correct a deviated septum, the result of a bar fight (sucker-punched), as well as to remove a golf-ball sized mucous polyp, the result of an Atlantic City-induced sinus infection (won $600, lost $600), from my sinus cavity. (My starboard side was full, my portside empty; the MRI looked like a black-and-white cookie.) The surgeon said this polyp was perhaps the largest he'd seen of its kind. On a recent post-surgery check-up, one of the pictured hypodermic needles was slid into my nostril, reaching a point in my cherry-red sinus wall latitudinal to my pupils. This was done to numb my nerves before a tandem intrusion of laser and miniature video-camera entered the same way, to extirpate an inflammed membrane. Lastly, amidst the odor of burning flesh, the pictured tongs were crammed in to twist, bite, tear, rip, yank the slimey thing out. Schwarzenegger ain't got nothing on me.

I used to think this incongruous dovetailing of brutality and technology was nonpareil. That was until I took a recess from Manhattan and its nose-picking specialists, rode Amtrack up the Hudson, hooked to Syracuse, and visited my family doctor.

I sojourn at my parents' house; the quietude and the home cooking are condusive to, uh, blogging. According to my mother and her doomsday outlook, although thinning hair is common and - if I remember the statistic correctly - affects an astounding 25% of men before their 22nd birthday, my particular case could possibly be caused by a number of horrible albeit irrational scenarios, including toxins lurking in my blood from histamine sprays which I used after the aforementioned surgery. Alas, my trips home are also condusive to hair-loss-causing stress from hypochondria. So my mother, the tributary of my defective genes, made me an appointment.

Here's the news the family doctor delivered. Rogaine works, kind of, for 30% of those who take it. Propecia, which TV ads warn against pregnant women even touching, is rarely effective and at its best tends to regrow hair in a monk-cap-shaped patch at the back of the head. That won't "cover" me. Plugs never looked right and could look worse than baldness. However, there was another option.

This option was a a kind of modern-day scalping; an ominous echo of my very first post on this blog.

In a proceedure part Cro-Magnon brutality, part transhumanist/post-humanist science fiction, a scalpel point is placed behind one ear, thereupon the blade cuts around the back of the head, lascerating a bloody rictus straight to the other ear. A scrap of flesh is torn out, and the wound is sewn up.

The hair-cells around the sides and back of the head are different, being longer-living and more durable, than those cells populating male-patern-baldness areas (hence the Bozo-the-Clown-ring-around). So, cells from the flesh-scrap are transplanted into that bare summit, and, after a few sessions of grafting, your perennials are ready for their first bloom. (The scar from the initial incision remains obscured under hair. Like a secret; a dark, hideous secret.)

I asked my doctor, "What you're saying is, I've got two options. Find a wife quickly, or be scalped alive?" He laughed.

I'll never forget the sound of that laugh.
(PHOTO: by Modern Bald Man.)