Thirty-year-old marathoner Lindsay Walter is one brave woman. Not only is she a powerhouse athlete, but she’s making a bold mark on the world by running with her natural bald head.
Walter has alopecia, which is an immune system-related disease that causes sudden hair loss. For people with alopecia, the immune system attacks hair follicles. This condition can be caused by severe stress, and can be treated with topical medications applied to the skin.
Read MoreWalter’s Alopecia Story
Walter was diagnosed with alopecia 28 years ago.“I lost all my hair when I was two years old,” Walter says. “And since I was so young, I don’t really remember much of the initial diagnosis and kind of what that was like. I know that my hair did fall out pretty rapidly within a couple of weeks.”
I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.
Walter wore a wig because she wanted to be like the other kids at school, she says.
“So I had a wig really ever since I could remember. I definitely used that as a security blanket just because I didn’t know how to talk about my alopecia. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. So it really just became like this huge secret that I was just hiding all of the time,” she says.
“So for the longest time, I just hated the way my bald head looked. I never liked to look at myself in the mirror,” says Walter, who described the feeling of wearing a wig as a child as emotionally difficult.
As she grew up, though, Walter found solace in sports. And she found it gave her confidence, too.
“I never like to look at myself. I saw nothing beautiful about my bald head,” says Walter. “It was really hard just feeling super alone and isolated. But I was very fortunate to be blessed with athletic ability. And so when I was in middle school, I began to play basketball and this time I started to stick out from everyone else, but it was in a very positive way. Um, just being good at basketball and I was getting attention. It really helps you and became like this huge saving grace for me to just be able to go home and play basketball and shoot hoops in my driveway.”
Walter used special glue to keep her wig on during basketball games because the sweat could cause the wig to move around on her head. But she says that during college she came to accept her condition even more. “I kind of slowly started to accept this reality that, you know, my hair isn’t coming back and I needed to do something about it. So I started off like very small. It took me a really long time, but once I found like my core group of friends, I would tell, you know, only one or two people, but for me that was like such a huge accomplishment.”
As time went on, Walter says she began to take her wig off more and found it freeing each time. After deciding to go into a grocery store without her wig, she says, “I just felt so empowered and so strong that I was like taking control of my alopecia and, you know, and just there, you know, feeling like walking in somewhere and owning it and being confident though, I had to, you know, give myself a pep talk before doing things like that.”
Walter has also used her story to inspire people battling cancer who have lost their hair as a result of treatment. She says, “Social media can be such a great tool and has really allowed me to connect with so many cancer patients who have lost their hair. Because they see that I also don’t care and I’m just living my life very happy, very grateful, very positive. People have reached out and I love it because we have this thing in common.”
Coping with Hair Loss
Losing one’s hair, as Walter has experienced, can be a traumatic and difficult experience. Hair loss is a common side effect of chemotherapy, and people who undergo chemotherapy to treat their cancer often experience hair loss.
Some newer technologies, such as cooling caps, have been introduced which prevent hair loss during chemotherapy. Dr. Julie Nangia, a medical oncologist at Baylor College of Medicine, says in an earlier interview, “One of the big areas of my research has been working with devices that can prevent hair loss during chemotherapy. And what we showed was that with the scalp cooling devices, 50% of women kept their hair after four cycles of chemo.”
“And without the devices, 100% of patients lost their hair,” says Dr. Nangia. “So these devices can be anywhere from 20% to 100% effective in preventing hair loss, depending on the chemotherapy type.”
Preventing Hair Loss During Chemotherapy: Scalp-Cooling Devices
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