James visited Dr. Gabel at one of his Seattle Hair Loss Clinics and provided us with his consultation experience. This will be the first of two posts provided by James during his hair restoration journey. This is his story:
Hello, my name is James and I’m currently based around Seattle, WA. I’ve been lurking on this site and others like it for literally years, pining over a hair transplant. Recently I finished killing off the last of my credit card debt (never again… ugh…) and saved up some cash, so I researched a couple of the top surgeons on this site and came to Dr. Gabel, based partially on results and partially on proximity (roughly a 1-hour flight down to Hillsboro, OR).
So, I recently scheduled a consult with him in his Seattle office. I went today, and gathered a little more information, and formulated a plan.
Dr. Gabel and I chatted and discussed options. I have to say I was very surprised at his honesty; since FUE is more expensive, and I’d heard it was more detailed and less scarring, and also since I went into the consult hell-bent on FUE, I fully expected any hair-restoration doc to tout it, and also to try and sell me on as many grafts as possible on the first transplant. But he explained that in my case, since I’m still fairly young for a transplant patient (27) and also have a family history of baldness, it would be best to stick around a conservative number like 1,500 to 1,800 in order to conserve donor areas for later. Also, he totally sold me on the strip-FUE instead of regular FUE due to the better quality/quantity of the grafts and having more of the healthy, insulating fatty-flesh remaining around each follicle unit after their extraction from the strip, and also due to the far lower likelihood of transection (accidentally cutting a hair in two; this happens during regular FUE due to the inability to tell which angle the hair is embedded in the scalp, and therefore sticking the punch-tool in at the wrong angle; this potentially wastes a lot of hairs).
Dr. Gabel is quite an upbeat and professional fellow, seems very passionate about his work. Maybe because he is one of the very few at the top of the field, maybe because he and a limited number of others are blazing a new trail in this field of surgery/medicine, maybe because his work certainly seems to be a lot more of an art form than most fields of medicine, making it so much more riveting and creative and presenting a unique challenge each time instead of just dolling out prescriptions for pills. Definitely the most lively, upbeat doctor I’ve ever talked to. Very optimistic, but down-to-earth and honest about expectations; an enthusiastic professional, not a salesman with a bag of tricks.
I seem to be roughly a Norwood 3 Vertex, and my primary goal is to bring my frontal hairline down about 0.5cm to 1cm and strengthen it up, restore my faded widow’s-peak, thicken up my frontal-scalp region, and mildly fill in my silver-dollar-sized bald/thin spot at my vertex. Maybe thicken up my receded/thinning temple hair just a bit if there is time and resources available.
I’m working fast to pull together the flight, hotel, scattered-but-ample financial means, and permission paperwork from the Navy to get this done (yes, they make you do that) so I can get this done in about three days… Mega-short notice! I wasn’t expecting to actually schedule a procedure for several more months, but I go on a two-week holiday leave period in two days and Gr. Gabel said he had an open appointment date on the 30th! I’m so stoked! I will continue to provide updates to this thread, so stay tuned.
Thanks James for providing your experience with a hair loss Dr in WA. Stay tuned for James’s second part of his journey with Dr. Gabel.
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