hair raising

One of the things that most skeeves me out is hair. Hair that is no longer attached to the head. If it's my own hair I find it annoying. If it's my own wet hair it's repulsive. If it's someone else's wet hair... I'm done. Out. Luckily I don't encounter this last scenario too often, really just when sharing hotel rooms, and I can suck it up and be a big girl for a few days. The other two though I have to deal with constantly.

I seem to shed hair at an exorbitant rate. I hated this back in OH because I could never seem to thoroughly vacuum all of the hair up off of the carpet. Here in ME I don't have the carpet problem, but you can see the hair all over the hard surface floors. I suppose I prefer the current situation, but still.

I'm not even going to go into detail about when my hair is wet, it's too much to handle.

What I don't understand is how I can lose so much hair and not be bald. If anything, there's more hair (it appears to be getting thicker).

Here's what I know (via aad.org):

• 90% of hair is in an active growth phase
• 10% of hair is in a resting phase or 2-3 months, after which it is shed
• it is normal to shed 50-100 hairs/day

Logically this makes sense to me. But in reality... how am I not bald!? 50-100 hairs/day?! It's not like new hairs just magically take root and fill in the gaps (at the same length, that is). Why don't I see shorter hairs in there somewhere? This will continue to baffle me.

And gross me out. Why must we shed hair?