Bald As A Badger … When All My Hair Fell Out!

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Di Gillett (00:08)

Hey, I’m Di Gillett and welcome to the Power of Women Podcast. We’re a platform that showcases and celebrates the strength, resilience and experience of women from all walks of life. And today, since I launched the podcast some 18 months ago, I have put all my energy into sharing the stories of some truly incredible and amazing women.

 

But what I’ve realised is that I actually have a few powerful stories and lessons of my own to share that hopefully will inspire and support others. And I also want to give a shout out to Tori Archbold and thank her for the time we’ve spent together which has afforded me a bigger picture view of what’s next for Power of Women.

 

So the story I want to open up with today is one that I actually shared on all of my social platforms over the last couple of weeks. And that is when in 1999, out of the blue, I developed Alopecia totalis. Now I was defined by my looks. Sadly, I…

 

openly admit that. I had long blonde hair, lots of people would comment on it and give me positive feedback. It was my one crowning aspect of my character that I prided myself on. So what happened in 1999 and it was horrendous and it was this slow torturous experience that started

 

six months earlier where one day at the hairdressers they commented that I had a little bit of hair missing above my ears on both sides of my head. And that slowly became this increasing pattern of baldness that went from my ears to the top of my head over a period of six months. And it was identical

 

in the way it fell out on both sides of my head. So it was following this very distinct pattern. Getting in the shower each morning and looking down on the shower floor and seeing loads and loads of my prized blonde hair on the shower floor was absolutely gutting. And I can remember going to a particular

 

dermatologist in the CBD where I was living at the time, my first question was, am I going to lose all my hair? And he very bluntly, without any sugar coating, said, probably. And then proceeded in that particular visit to his clinic to inject up to 2,000 cortisone needles into my rapidly balding head.

 

was agonizing and I can remember saying to him I can hear the needles actually piercing the skin. You could hear that pop where that syringe was actually breaking through the surface of the skin and I pointed that out to this practitioner and he said I’m sorry the needles probably got blunt where we’ve hit the scalp.

 

None of this was done with any level of compassion or support. It was the most clinical gut-wrenching experience. And I had walked out of my office to come to this appointment. And I remember jumping on a tram to take the ride back to the office and my head was spinning. I’d just been told all of my hair was going to fall out. I’d just had this agonizing treatment that was delivered in the most brutal manner.

 

And the messaging from this specialist was beyond words. So then various journeys, I started to think, what am I going to do? And I kept down the Western medicine path, which saw me land at the clinic, another clinic in my hometown of probably one of Australia’s preeminent dermatologists. And that was a really short-lived relationship. And it was

 

One that ended in a manner which is not uncommon with me if I find something doesn’t fit with my beliefs or my ideas or my values, I speak out and I speak out in a direct and blunt manner. So I started to visit this second specialist who was also a dermatologist and in the world of hair loss there’s a whole lot of other sub-specialists that branch off, trichologists and all sorts of things.

 

and that had been an unsuccessful journey. So I’m at the rooms of this second dermatologist and his process was similar to the first. Inject you with cortisone and then he would apply this acidic tincture to my nail balding scalp and put you under this heat lamp for an intense period in what was for all intents and purposes a celerium.

 

And after the third session with this preeminent dermatologist, I said to him, I think your whole process is deeply flawed. And here’s my reasons why. You’re injecting me with cortisone, and cortisone is going to cause pits in my bones and irreparable damage. You’re putting this acidic tincture on my head and then putting me under a heat lamp, which there is no doubt over time is going to give me skin cancer.

 

So I’m beginning to get suspicious about, know, this is a lifelong engagement until I have no life left with these specialists because one cure causes something else. And his delivery of that was, well, if you don’t believe what I’m doing, don’t bother coming back. I won’t say on this podcast quite what my direct response with it because it is packed full of expletives, but suffice to say you could not have

 

me to walk back through his doors for another appointment ever again. So then I thought I don’t know what I’m going to do. By this stage I am nearly bald. Nearly bald. I’m starting to wear bandanas. I’m starting to explore what to do with wigs. And at the same time I thought I need to start to look beyond Australia for a cure because I couldn’t find anything here.

 

And I started to do some research and look at international marketplaces. It seemed at the time that Princess Caroline of Monaco was tackling a similar issue that she wasn’t overly public about, but I’d found a few threads. And keep in mind in 1999, the internet certainly wasn’t the resource tool that it is today and chat GPT did not exist.

 

So I kept looking at alternative medicine. My biggest problem with Western medicine was that the whole approach to treating this hair loss, which had been termed alopecia totalis, because I was now losing my eyelashes, my eyebrows, all of the hair on my body, which in some respects was a great thing, in other respects was just a nightmare, was that the Western medicine approach to this was to treat

 

the condition on the surface to treat the after the event where clearly something in my system or in my life or in my surroundings had actually caused this and Western medicine had no interest in that. So the journey went on and I went to naturopaths and all sorts of things and I had some horrendous experiences along the way.

 

And some of those were I was now close to bald with just a small amount of hair at the top of my head, which if I wore a bandana, allowed me to have sort of some thinning strands down the side of my bandana, which kind of didn’t necessarily announce to the world that I was completely bald. So with my corporate suits going into a CBD office every day,

 

I integrated a bandana into part of my look. The problem with doing that though was in going and pitching for business and I was in the recruitment and search space was that when you’re trying to pitch for business with clients that might be a particular campaign that was going to last for months and months and months, you could see it all over the client’s face that they had some reticence around engaging you.

 

because they actually didn’t know whether you were going to be around for that many months because the assumption of hair loss was immediately cancer. So I realised there and then that I had to actually share what I was going through openly, otherwise the commercial fallout of that was going to impact my financial future. And whilst I was in a relationship at the time,

 

There was no financial support from that relationship and long story short, that relationship which was loaded with coercive control was probably one of the many causal factors that actually kicked off this alopecia totalis which falls into the autoimmune family. I had to show up my financial future and I can remember some

 

really awful experiences. went to a client meeting one side of town on a particular windy day with my bandana on and I decided to walk back to the office which was probably, I don’t know, about five city blocks across town. Windy day, roaring north wind and halfway back heading back for another meeting at my office, my bandana flew off.

 

And here I am stuck in the middle of the city in a bright red suit which in its own right stood out. My bandana had blown off and I am standing there with a few bloody strands of hair blowing in the wind and I was absolutely gutted. And I remember walking past a particular shop in the city which was the tie rack which specialised in men’s ties and

 

and all sorts of scarves. And the woman, when I was walking past the front of the store, saw me and beckoned me to come in. And she had realized what was happening. And she offered me a bandana. And she tied it on my head, wouldn’t let me pay for it, and set me on my way back to my office. And that

 

a bit like an episode that I’m also releasing this week with Hannah Asafiri was my own personal experience of a random act of kindness that has stuck with me for years. So my balding journey is continuing and I am now down to literally a 20 cent piece circle of hair left on the top of my head.

 

which at this stage is still long. hadn’t brought myself to be able to do anything with it other than to hang on to it for dear life. And I can remember making the decision to shave that bit off with my then partner’s home shaver because he had a number one blade. And whilst it was one single sweep of the shaver to take it off, it was the…

 

most challenging thing to do and probably took me 20 minutes to actually take that one sweep and shave it off. Another thing that had happened before I had done that, the company that I was with required us all to go to Sydney for a promotional tour where my business was partnering with the global brand Monster.

 

as a promotional campaign and I remember it required us to walk around Sydney CBD literally wearing sandwich boards promoting the launch of Monster. It was September and it was blowing a gale in Sydney and I now have it embedded in my brain that September is the windiest month of the year in Australia and it was similar to that experience of losing my bandana.

 

between meetings previously where walking around the city literally with people looking at you because you’re walking around with this sandwich board on as a walking billboard, wearing a bandana, looking like I was on my last legs, it was probably one of the most horrendous tasks at that point in time to be asked to do.

 

And we also had a black tie event with the company on the final evening of our billboard walking. And I backed out of that because I just couldn’t work out how to front up to this black tie event and make a bandana work and make it work in terms of presenting me as a perfectionist as I wanted to present. So we come back to Melbourne after that Sydney visit and two days after

 

I’m on my way to the office. My then partner was driving me to work that morning. And I said to him, I can’t go in. I’m going to ring them and tell them I just can’t go in. And so I made a phone call into the office and spoke to my then line manager who said to me, why aren’t you coping? The bluntness of his reaction of aren’t I coping with losing my hair, going bald, can’t find a cure.

 

just gutted me. And I went back home. My then partner went off to work and I was home alone and I had to say I hit probably the darkest moment of my life. And I actually seriously contemplated not staying around. I seriously contemplated my own demise. And I sat with that for a few hours.

 

And in sitting with that for a few hours and writing down on it, not in a journal at that point in time, but on a piece of paper, I did two columns. What I couldn’t cope with and another column, what could I change? I couldn’t cope with how I looked. I couldn’t cope with how I felt. And I couldn’t cope with the fact that I couldn’t find a cure. And I also couldn’t cope

 

with the fact that I couldn’t find any wigs that fitted me and that was a big part of not being able to control how I looked. On the right hand side of what I could control, I could control speaking out about what I was feeling rather than hiding it. I could, if I put my skills and my network to the test,

 

solve or start to work on a solution for wigs, if I actually started to develop my own wigs that would fit my particularly small head, which was the issue with wigs in the marketplace at that time. And as such, I could then control how I face the world. So the right-hand column won out and

 

I set about starting a small wig business, not really from a commercial venture, more from my own personal use. Albeit I sold and gave away a few to other people that I started to come into contact with through what was an alopecia network within my home state. I also started to advocate for people, particularly children struggling with alopecia because I found that I had a voice

 

that I could speak out about it and talk publicly rather than hiding behind what was happening to me. And I found strength in that and I could share that strength with kids because kids going through an alopecia journey, be it partial or total baldness, in the schoolyard found themselves in a very difficult place. And the schoolyard, as we know, is somewhere where bullying is rife.

 

And for somebody with any points of difference or something that made them look strange or look odd, made them a target for bullying. So I started to do some work there. The other thing I started to do was I thought I could do more than just talk about this. I could put pen to paper and start to write a book. And my working title for the book was Bulled as a Badger. And I

 

did garner the interest of two publishing houses. And I started that book, but I have to say regrettably, I never finished it. And maybe that’s something in my unfinished journey again. So I’m still exploring cures. I’m now completely bald. I can’t find a cure. And a friend, in fact, the wife of a friend of mine,

 

coercive controlling partner suggested that rather than look internationally and do all of this exploring that I was doing, she recommended a very alternative therapist who she put a lot of trust in that was in my hometown in Melbourne. So I made an appointment and drove down to this particular clinic.

 

And I can never forget walking in the door. was this very rudimentary clinic, in almost a semi-industrial part of Melbourne. And it had a pale blue facade. And the place was called Inerchi and the practitioner was Doug Davies. And in those days, my attire, my work attire was corporate suits and stiletto heels.

 

And I remember walking into the doors to this very alternative clinic where on the right was a counter and behind that counter was just jars and jars and jars of Chinese medicinal herbs. And on the left was the waiting room and everybody in the waiting room was sitting with their shoes off that they had put on this rack just inside the door. And those shoes were primarily Birkenstocks and all varieties of flat shoes. And the only pair of Louboutin

 

high heels on that rack were mine. And I hadn’t met Doug at this stage and he walked out to his next appointment, which was me, and he looked at the shoe rack and he looked around and saw me sitting there in a corporate suit and said, Diane, I said yes. And that started the beginning of an incredible relationship with Doug and a two to two and a half year journey of twists and turns that

 

resulted in me opening my eyes, embracing very alternative therapies and meditation and yoga and a journey with Chinese herbs and custom-made tinctures that over the course of two and a half years got the most amazing result of getting my hair back. Now it wasn’t a linear journey. There were fits and starts. It would start to grow back. It would fall out.

 

Heartbreaking. Get back on track again, start to grow, we change the medicines. And if anybody’s done Chinese herbal medicine, when somebody asks you to boil these Chinese herbs up into a tea, you know it makes the residents that you might be sharing with anybody else absolutely unlivable because the pungent smell of the tea is unforgettable. And it also takes time. So I’d said to Doug, look,

 

This whole process is adding more stress into my world when stress is part of my problem. And I need a different solution. I need you to grind these herbs down and turn them into capsules that I can swallow instead of boiling the teas. And he said to me, that’ll take more time. I said, I appreciate that. That I am prepared to acknowledge, but it is the only way I can integrate this ⁓

 

Process that I’m going through with you into my life without it becoming another part of the problem Which big ticket was probably stress from relationships stress from work stress from being a perfectionist Poor blood flow from having broken my back in a skiing accident many years prior All of these things were an amalgam of things that had my body stiffen up that the net result was Blood flow was compromised to my head

 

that ultimately led to the hair loss. Now whether in fact my hair loss was an autoimmune disorder, which I actually really question, and whether it was more these causal effects that had caused stress in my body to stiffen and in fact compromise blood flow, which I actually think was more to the point. Through that time, I referred many other

 

Women in particular who had suffered hair loss, some who had been bald for over 20 years, I referred them to Doug and they started their own amazing journeys of recovery. And one of the proudest moments was leading into Doug Davies finally retiring some, I think probably 10 years ago now, was when they reached out and asked me to write a testimonial for a book that was being written as part of his… ⁓

 

retirement exit and sitting down and putting a small testimonial to paper that was reflective of this journey was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to put to paper because it had all of those emotions flooding back up and that was probably the first time that I had revisited that story for about 10 years. But I do want to say what this particular journey which

 

covered the period of 1999 to 2004 where I was just coming into, for the first time, having a full head of short hair when I met my husband George Danekian at a best friend’s wedding. And I remember going on a walk along the beach with George as one of our first dates. And it was the first time I had walked along the waterfront not afraid

 

of the wind either blowing off my bandana or my wig for the first time in four years. And I can’t tell you how impactful, it’s making me emotional talking about it, how impactful that was to actually take that walk along the beach without fear of being exposed literally. So that four year journey taught me that I am in fact

 

more than how I look because over that four-year journey I was headhunted twice for significant roles in the recruitment and search space. I also learned that I had the resilience to pull myself back from the darkest moment of my life and identify what I had to live for. And I also identified that I had the courage to speak out publicly

 

about what I was experiencing as a means of helping others and that was probably one of the most important learnings of all. One of my failures though out of this was I did say at the time when I’d started to get my hair back that I would never be defined by my hair ever again. Well for those who know what I look like today and it’s now 2025

 

You would have to say I probably never been more defined by my hair in any other point in time in my life than I am today because it is the first statement that probably people notice about me when I walk through the door. So that’s a failure. However, what I am never fazed by is the fact that at any day when my hairdo doesn’t work, I don’t call that a bad hair day because when you have had a hair day,

 

bad hair day that is actually losing your hair, that changes the benchmark for what a bad hair day is. So I don’t have any bad hair days. So if I can leave you with those three lessons about what I really felt were the most impactful, I am more than I look. I am far more than what I look like. That I have the resilience to pull myself back from my darkest moments.

 

and I believe you do too, and that if you have the courage to speak out about adversity and things that you’ve experienced in your life to help others, to really help others get back on their journey to recovery, whatever that journey might be, that is something I cannot stress enough as being a fabulous thing to do. So.

 

I am going to do more episodes at the Power of Women that are solo episodes because I think I do have some stories to share, not all out of adversity, but stories to share that hopefully might inspire others in the same way as some of the incredible stories that I am privileged to share with you through the podcast interviews with the amazing women that I’m bringing to the table and giving a platform through the Power of Women podcast.

 

I’m going to do the same with just a few more stories like this where I speak to you one on one. I hope it resonated. I hope it’s helpful. Until next time.