Cancer survivor Sara gets her first Total Cover Plus hair system

When you first meet Sara, she seems like a nice woman leading a normal life. She looks nice, she laughs a lot, she has 3 children and everything seems to be going well for her. But it hasn't always been like that. Sarah suffered from cancer and, in the process of battling it, she lost her hair due to the treatments.The most important thing: She won the battle and now is cancer free. But unlike a lot of patients, her hair didn’t fully grow back and left her with another battle: How to get her hair back. Sarah wanted to share her story in her (upcoming) video blog to give other women hope and to support women who have gone through what she went through.After she had received various treatments for her cancer and eventually beat the illness, her hair, especially on the top of her head, didn’t grow back to what it was before. Not only did the structure and the colour change slightly, in the top section of her head the hair only grew back patchily. It was, and still is, very thin. While her front hairline and the back of her hair grew fairly strong, the top just didn’t grow and barely had any body. To just have come out of such a hard battle and face such a humiliating, demoralising and self-esteem lowering situation was hard. At least that's how Sara felt.When fighting cancer, people’s morale plays a very important role. When people in Sara’s position feel emotionally too low about their looks, for example because of their hair loss, they struggle to physically get better and their recovery time is considerably longer. And, of course, losing their hair knocks many people’s confidence and sense of self completely flat. Sara felt the same. While she had already beaten her illness, there were still the physical after-effects to battle with. She felt this very strongly in herself. In women this hair loss issue is acknowledged as a devastating loss on many levels. Hair has so many meanings for women. It is connected to both illness and femininity and thus hair loss has a devastating impact. There are hardly any women in the media with hair loss or who actively show their baldness. Furthermore, it is especially hard if you are told that your hair will never return, as Sara’s is unlikely to.As much as people might say she should be happy to have her health back (which she is of course), losing your hair puts you right back in a vulnerable position, a different form of being ill. Everybody treats you as if you were still far from healthy and this has a devastating effect on your emotional and psychological health.So Sarah decided to do something and cover it up. No drugs or creams could re-stimulate her permanently damaged follicles.She tried spray-on hair fibres, but they simply weren’t practical for her. She had far too little hair for it to achieve an acceptable result and, like all people using hair nano fibres know, these fibres washed away in the rain or when she sweated. When it was windy these fibres would blow off, when it rained you could see dark lines of a mix of water and fibres running down her face and when she sweated the same thing happened. On top of that, nobody was allowed to touch her or else they ended up with these fibres everywhere. So taking care of her children, being active or simply going out, dancing and socialising turned into serious and difficult scenarios. She researched further and soon found a clip-in hairpiece. It did the job of covering her balding area, which resulted in people not giving her the strange looks so much anymore and it was ok. It did improve her situation drastically. But she experienced three issues with it:She was always self-conscious that she was wearing something. It was basically like a hat. So while somebody who wasn’t too close might not have known, she could always feel it and it worried her. At night she had to take it off and in the morning put it back on. So instead of feeling peace of mind, she was actually always aware and felt highly limited in terms of what she could or couldn’t do. Heat built up underneath the hairpiece. So it didn’t feel like her own hair and it was uncomfortable. The hairpiece had to clip into her existing hair. While she was losing more hair, the clips were creating more tension on her hair at the same time. She lost more hair as a result and therefore got to a stage where she couldn’t really use the clip-in hairpiece anymore.So for her it was limiting, often uncomfortable and, of course, in a terrible way it almost became a daily reminder of her hair loss. Sara wanted her old life back. That's why she researched further and found Tara Phillips, the Total Cover Plus hair replacement specialist in Guildford near London. They discussed various possibilities for Sara. Since Sara isn’t an Alopecia Totalis sufferer and still has some hair left, they looked at the options. To begin with, Tara considered a Total Cover Plus hair integration system for Sara instead of the Total Cover Plus hair system. But Sara feared that if she lost more hair, integrating her broken and thin hair into an integration system wouldn’t work for very long. She explained that since her hair had become so thin and fine that she couldn’t do anything with it, she had lost any emotional attachment to her weak hair and decided to rather get rid of it and make use of a Total Cover Plus hair system. Tara discussed all the options and specifications with her to ensure that Sara got the hair solution that she wanted. She wanted to be sure that when Sara got her hair solution it would look and feel as if it was her own hair. And, as Sara says, she simply hasn’t looked back since. With the hair system, she can now sleep with hair, shower with hair, swim with hair and basically live a normal life just like she used to before she lost her hair. Sara missed the joy of swimming with her children and her children missed the joy of swimming with their mum. While she was able to swim with her clip-in hairpiece, she was very limited and could not get it wet. This meant she couldn’t go underwater or risk it coming loose or away. So when she got her first Total Cover Plus hair system, one of the first things she did was to take her children to a water park and swim and dive in the water. She also went on fast waterslides and had a great time. It basically meant that suddenly she had hair and didn’t have to worry.In addition, having parted company with her long-term partner, as a now single woman she felt limited in her chances to meet somebody new. People look at you differently when you suffer from hair loss as a woman and you look differently at yourself. The combination of these two factors makes it very difficult to meet somebody who is unbiased and without prejudice. But the Total Cover Plus hair system gave her the chance to be a normal woman with hair again. When she now meets somebody she is a person with hair until she decides to tell that person about her hair situation.Hair loss has so many unintended unpredictable consequences and issues far beyond just not looking good. So the goal of our hair system is NORMALITY – to create a status quo that forms the basis of everything that you want to do. In her video blog, Sara shows how she is getting a new hair system, i.e. how the old one is being taken off and replaced with a new one. So anybody who is interested in seeing how it works should watch the video, which you can find at the bottom of this page.When we filmed the blog, Joan was also present, who we understand was still undergoing cancer treatment at the time. Joan specialises in helping women find hair loss solutions to feel better about their looks and hair issues caused by aggressive medical treatments. Feeling better, looking better and getting better is the message she wants to get across to people. She watched the entire procedure and chatted along with Sara and Tara throughout the process. The great thing was to see how the end result literally left her speechless, she just couldn’t believe her eyes. Check out the video to see it for yourself.At the end of the day Sara got a full head of hair again and now doesn’t have to worry about anybody being able to notice it. She is now as outgoing and lively as she used to be and soon she will even have a go at jumping out of an aeroplane for her first skydive. It is lovely to see how the Total Cover Plus hair system can make a difference.It was a pleasure meeting Sara. She had to be so strong to go through such a difficult time in her life and I’m really impressed. Thank you Sara for sharing your story with us. I would also like to thank Tara for the brilliant job she did. It was really nice to see how you transformed Sara.We founded Total Cover Plus to resolve our own hair loss issues and are always happy to see that we can help so many other people, too.Jonas(technical director)