MY HAIR LOSS WAS RUINING MY LIFE

Katie O'Callaghan, 42, was fed up with hiding under a hat

- JULIA SIDWELL AND CLARE SWATMAN

Pulling a hat down over my head, I glanced at my reflection in the mirror, then blinked back tears. Mirrors were my enemy and hats were my armour.

It was January 2016, and having recently become a mum to my little girl, Rosie, then four months, I should have been happily snapping selfies of the two of us together, but although I cherished my daughter, motherhood had brought with it an onslaught of stress and exhaustion and, as a result, each morning, my hair was falling out in huge clumps. Now, I was losing so much hair I could barely stand to look at myself, but this wasn’t the first time it’d happened.

At just six years old, I remember all my eyelashes falling out and my mum, Vivien, taking me to see the GP. ‘It’s just stress,’ the doctor said.

In time, my eyelashes grew back, but by my late teens, I'd started to notice bald patches on my head.

‘It’s probably using too much bleach,’ my hairdresser said, so I ditched blonde highlights in favour of my natural brunette look and hoped my hair would strengthen up. But as time passed, it only seemed to get thinner.

‘Hopefully it'll grow back on its own,’ doctors told me, time and time again. But it never did.

Until, aged 32, when I fell pregnant. All those amazing pregnancy hormones kicked in and, for the first time in my life, I had a full, thick head of hair. As my bump grew, I was positively glowing. I loved my glossy, swishy ponytail and hoped that at long last, my hair problems were a thing of the past, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

QUIETLY WORRYING