The nurse smiled as she handed Tyler a big plastic cube and said, "So which person do you feel like this week?" Tyler, who was receiving treatment for cancer, turned the cube over in his hands and checked out each of its sides. One had a drawing of a brown-eyed girl wearing a frown on her face. Another side had a drawing of a man who looked angry. A third side had a girl with braids who looked happy. Finally, Tyler pointed to the side with the drawing that reminded him of himself: a boy with no hair who looked scared.

"Scared?" the nurse asked, surprised. "You don't seem scared to me these days!"

"No, not scared - bald!" Tyler said, lifting up his Red Sox baseball cap and pointing to his shiny head.

What Is Hair Loss?
Actually, it's totally normal for kids to lose some hair each day. Most people lose about 50 to 100 hairs every day - and it's a good thing, because we'd all look like huge hairballs if we didn't! Normally, when hair falls out, new hairs start forming in the same place as the old ones.

But when someone really has hair loss, the hairs don't grow back. Or they do grow, but there aren't enough of them to take the place of what's already fallen out. Hair can fall out completely or in just one spot. Sometimes there will be several bald spots or it might look thinner because only some of the hairs have fallen out. Hair loss can happen to kids for a lot of different reasons. The fancy name for hair loss is alopecia (say: ah-loh-pee-shuh).