When I was a boy, my dad told me that three things are inevitable in our family: death, taxes, and male pattern baldness. Like most sons, I'm forever trying to prove him wrong. That's why, 30 years later, I decided to get a hair transplant.

But not any old hair transplant. Certainly not one like my buddy Brad's -- he wound up with unsightly clumps sprouting from his scalp. Nor one like friend John's, which led to days of suffering: "The anesthesia made my face swell up like Quasimodo," he says.