I must have swam in the wrong end of the gene pool as a zygote because I’ve got HAIR ISSUES, none of which have anything to do with decisions I’ve made. The problems are so extensive I don’t even know where to begin.

I guess I’ll start at the top where the most obvious hair issue resides, that’s right, baldness. The great blessing from my genes that puts me at a social and economic disadvantage as soon as I walk through a door. I’m the bald guy, end of story. I miss my hair and would very much like it back but it’s not to be. Let’s call that hair issue number one.

In one of life’s cruel jokes, the lack of hair on my head has been replaced with an abundance of hair everywhere else. Hairy arms? Check. Hairy legs? Check. Feet and hands? Covered, literally. I’m a monkey man. I have more hair on my back than most men have on their chest. And more on my chest than, well let’s just say it’s very brush’able and move on.

Oops, I spoke too soon. My next hair problem was caused by a decision I made although I didn’t realize it at first. Alopecia areata is a fancy term for patchy baldness that developed in both my beard and head. It’s an auto-immune disorder whereby your immune system treats your hair follicles as foreign so they fall out leaving little random islands of baldness. The standard treatment is steroid injections at the sites which suppress your body’s immune response and the hair eventually grows back.

I’d never had the problem before so I suspected it was something in my environment that was causing it. Turns out the culprit was an artificial sweetener. The alopecia outbreak coincided with me going on the Atkins diet a few years ago which is when I first started consuming sucralose, the sweetener that comes in the yellow packages. It took me a while to figure out that’s what was causing it. I eventually stopped all artificial sweeteners and slowly the bald patches started to disappear.

My suspicions about the cause of the alopecia were confirmed on two separate occasions due to relapses. It came back one time because I was eating microwave kettle corn which, unbeknownst to me at the time, contains sucralose. The second time it was in a seemingly innocuous parfait with fruit and yogurt. When the bald patches returned, I wondered where the sucralose was hiding. I soon discovered a lot of lowfat yogurts have sucralose in them. The resulting bald patches in my beard from that lesson are still recovering.

So let’s review, baldness and hairy body? I can blame my genes. Alopecia areata? Sorta my fault but not really. If I had any idea sucralose would have caused such a problem, I never would have consumed it in the first place. I wish I could say the hair issues end there but I can’t, there’s more.

I’ve always had bold eyebrows and I took a certain pride in them. Now they’ve turned on me by going beyond bold to lengthy. Most people wake up in the morning with bed-head, I wake up with bed-eyebrows. They’re not quite Andy Rooney wild but they hint at it in my future and it scares me. Speaking of scary, let’s keep this hair freakshow moving and tackle my next issue.

If I didn’t take countermeasures, my nose would look like I was trying to sneeze a mouse out of it. Seriously! I know Evolution is trying to do me a favor by helping to prevent me from snorting up foreign matter but d*mn! It’s a thicket in there. Thankfully my Panasonic trimmer makes short work of it.

The trimmer also comes in handy for my latest hair problem. Now that I’m starting to join that age group known as middle age, I’m sprouting hair where I’ve never had it before. Namely, my ears. As if I didn’t have enough hair problems, I now have to start checking my freakin’ ears?!?! Where will it end?

I hope I haven’t frightened you too much with this little TMI session. As you can see, I have a sense of humor about most of it but if I ever got three free wishes I know how I’d use them.

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