After your surgery, remember to avoid doing any exercising and take your prescribed medications as advised.
The following is a breakdown of how the first 10 days after your hair transplant will look like. Use it as a template as to what to expect the first 10 days of post-op care. Contact your surgeon if any situation not listed arises.
However, following your doctor’s orders and staying in touch with him is essential during this process.
Post-Op: FUE Hair Transplant After 10 Days: Day 1 to 3
When it’s time to sleep, do so keeping your head in a 45-degree angle with extra pillows.
Do not sleep face down and avoid any possible contact between the pillow and the grafting site. Sleeping horizontally or sleeping in your face will cause massive swelling, something you would want to avoid.
Minor swelling will be present in the graft site along with some discomforting itch, do not scratch it. To subside it, apply ice packs in the area for two to five minutes every 30 or 60 minutes throughout the day.
Regarding washing your hair, you can do so by avoiding the shower and using a cup full of water. The constant falling of water from the shower on the graft site damages it. With the cup you can control the quantity and speed of the falling water, just let it fall slowly.
When outside, direct sunlight to your graft site should be avoided, it dries moisture and delays healing.
Post-Op: FUE Hair Transplant After 10 Days: Day 4 to 6
As the hair follicles settle in, you will begin to fill an increased urge to scratch it due to itching. Don’t do it. It is gonna take you a lot of mental strength so be ready, practising meditation and deep relaxation exercises might help.
Around this time, your antibiotic treatment should end since now there is little risk of infections. A tightness-like feeling in your scalp due to its repopulation is completely normal.
Post-Op: FUE Hair Transplant After 10 Days: Day 7 to 9
The swelling around the donor site should have mostly subsided by now and will be barely noticeable. Your new hair in the grafting site will feel awfully like newly growing beard hairs. That is a good sign.
Post-Op: FUE Hair Transplant After 10 Days: Day 10
During the 10th day, you can start washing your hair on the shower without much care besides not pulling the grafts. Crust and scabs from the donor site should begin to fall around this time if they had not already. You’ll still feel a slight itch on the graft site, resist it and please remember to stay clear from scratching it for another week.
More importantly, around this time, you will enter the ‘shedding phase’. In it, the new hair transplanted to your graft site will start to fall. Do not worry; this is necessary. The hair might have fallen, but the hair follicle is still firmly in place, it just sheds the hair to make room for the new ones.