Friday
June 6, 2003
As the cruise was coming to end, Mr. Giotis asked us if we'd
like the cruise to continue for another week. We enthusiastically
agreed, only to be greatly disappointed to find out he was
joking.
 Some of us including myself were up late the night before
enjoying the customs of Greek song and dance on the island
of Aigina, but the crew advised we had to leave promptly at
8:00 AM or we'd be left behind. I awoke late on three hours
of sleep and frantically packed my belongings and raced to
the shuttle. This later turned out to be a blessing in disguise
as I was too tired to have any nausea from watching live surgery.
Instead the whole process was quite fascinating to me.
At
8:00 AM we disembarked in Piraeus and took a shuttle to the
DHI Hair Institute. DHI had a surprise for us and demonstrated
application and maintenance of their non-surgical, quality
hair systems on one of their Hair Institute managers. DHI demonstrated
their high quality, fully breathable hair systems which help
eliminate the scalp irritation of fully bonded skin graft systems.
Next, we were off to the DHI Plastic Surgery Clinic where
I watched a full day of exciting surgical procedures. Patients
and surgeons from over 10 countries were introduced to each
other and the surgical program began.
I
was able to view several live strip and FIT surgeries:
 • The
first was a session of 1200 grafts with the DHI No Touch
Technique on an English patient. Dr. Paul Straub cut
the donor strip and Dr. Russel Knudsen designed the hairline
recipient sites. Dr. Gerald Cooley served as the microscopic
follicular unit preparation inspector.
• A
Greek patient was the second case, with dense graft packing
of 45 fu/cm2. Dr Knudsen removed
the grafts via strip
harvest and Dr. Jimenez designed the hairline. The DHI surgical
technicians dissected the strip grafts and placed them with
the DHI Implanter.
• Dr.
Minotakis impressed everyone with his skill using the DHI-Han
Implanter to reconstruct a patient's
eyebrows.
Even on close inspection I couldn't tell that any work had
been done as the eyebrows looked completely natural.
• Finally, with amazing precision Dr
Papadopoulos performed an eyelash session.
 During
one of my breaks Mr. Giotis introduced me to several
DHI patients to show off the pencil line donor
scars created by the team of physicians at DHI. I was
also able to see a future repair patient with pluggy grafts
sitting next to a DHI patient with a perfectly natural hairline.
It was quite beneficial to see the contrast between the
two patients and to fully appreciate the
difference between a good hair transplant and a bad hair transplant.
As
exciting as the surgery was, it unfortunately had to come
to an end as we had to leave for the Gala Dinner program and
Phidias Awards Ceremony to award the physicians
for their excellent contributions to the industry. |
