Everyone warned me about the front. Nobody said a word about the back.
Day 10 after FUE, and the whole donor band feels like someone else's scalp has been stapled onto my head. Numb in a broad patch above the hairline at the back, tight when I look down, and there's a strange crawling feeling at the edges of the numb bit that comes and goes. Touching it is genuinely odd, like touching your face at the dentist.
The recipient area is behaving itself. It's the donor that's freaking me out. How long does this last, and is the tightness supposed to be there this long?
Numb donor for about six weeks here, tightness gone way before that. The crawling thing you're describing is what mine did as sensation came back, sort of pins and needles but slower and more annoying.
Mine took about three months to feel fully normal at the back, and I'd honestly stopped noticing it long before it finished. You just gradually realise one day that you scratched the back of your head without thinking about it.
Tightness is worth separating out though. A bit of tight is normal. Tight enough that it's pulling, or getting worse rather than better, is a thing to mention to your clinic, especially after FUT where the closure is under tension.
The "not mine" description is exactly right and I've never seen anyone put it that well. Mine felt like a helmet lining for about a month.
What surprised me more was how much worse the donor looked than the front in the first fortnight. Everyone photographs the hairline. Nobody photographs the back, so you've got nothing to compare against and you assume the worst.
hatman_rich said:
someone else's scalp has been stapled onto my head
That is close to word for word what I wrote in my own notes at about day 8, so you are in normal company here.
The straightforward part: numbness in and around the donor after harvesting is common and is usually temporary, because small sensory nerves in the area are disturbed and take their time recovering. Weeks to a few months is the usual span, and the odd crawling or pins and needles at the edges that Liam mentions is generally sensation coming back rather than anything going wrong. Persistent numbness that never fully resolves is a recognised but uncommon outcome, in the region of a couple of percent, and it is one of the things worth having heard about before surgery rather than discovering at day 10. Tightness is a separate sensation, mostly from swelling and healing, and it typically eases through the second and third weeks.
The part I would not fudge: I cannot tell you whether your particular back of head is doing the ordinary thing, because I have not seen it and neither has anyone else in this thread. What earns a call to your own clinic today rather than a reply here is tightness that is increasing rather than settling, real pain as opposed to strangeness, heat, spreading redness or discharge. Those are theirs to assess, and they know how much they took and from where.
For context on why this area gets so little airtime and deserves more, I wrote the donor area and overharvesting, and the general week by week sequence is in hair transplant recovery.
Three weeks on from posting. Tightness went first, basically gone by day 16. The numb patch has shrunk from a band to a coin sized area and the crawling has mostly stopped.
Still slightly odd to the touch back there. But it's dropped from "thing I think about every hour" to "thing I noticed while writing this", which is the direction you want.
Good update. Worth flagging for anyone finding this later that mine never went 100% back to normal in one small patch, and I genuinely do not care, because you cannot see numbness. It's only unsettling while it's new.
Closed to new replies (sixty days without one). If the question is about your own scalp, your graft count or your recovery, that is a conversation with the surgeon who examined you. Nobody here has.
