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CBN.com – Andea Roussel was a healthy baby girl with a full head of hair. Then at the age of two, her hair started falling out in patches. By four, she was completely bald.
"I always remember being bald. And at age four, my mom told me that we had a doctor’s appointment to go to. I told her I did not want to go, that I wanted to go to Brownies and Girl Scouts. She [Andrea's mother] said, “If this kid doesn’t care, then okay," remembers Andrea.
Andrea was diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease called Alopecia. Patients are generally healthy. Their bodies just don’t produce hair.
"I had wigs that were netted, and I had to use double stick tape to keep them on. You really could tell they looked fake, kind of like a Halloween wig. And then somehow my parents found out about a company called Hair Wonders, and they make molds. It is a direct mold of a person’s head and just like if you broke an arm and they casted your arm, they cast your head. Then they would surgically implant into the mold, real human hair. So they were quite expensive, but they were beautiful. I could do roller coasters, go underwater, anything with them."
Andrea was never bothered by her condition.
"In my head, I just thought, 'Well nobody knows I have a wig on, and nobody can tell.' And to me, I had hair ... I had perfect reddish brown hair that I could put bows in, and I learned how to french braid. It was kind of an accessory; it was kind of like a shoe. When my sister and I would get ready for school, my mom would be like, “Katie, get up. Andrea, get your hair, put your shoes on, come on.' ”
An avid field hockey player, Andrea decided to wear a bandanna when she played on her high school team.
"I stuck out easily and again, it wasn’t a big thing for me. I just couldn’t grasp that it really was such a significant thing to be 16 and be a girl walking around bald," she admits.
Andrea went on to play field hockey for the University of Louisville. One August day, she was walking through the gym after practice, when a stranger spoke to her.
"I heard a voice behind me say, 'Excuse me, ma’am,' so I turned around, paused, and Greg was in the corner with his mop," recounts Andrea.
"I thought she was a cancer patient, and I felt compassion for her," says Greg.
"I just explained to him like everyone else I had in 20 years, that I didn’t have cancer, that I just had Alopecia and no big deal. And he said, 'Well God thinks hair is important, too. Do you mind if I still pray?' And I was like, by all means."
"So he took off his gloves which I guess I remember so vividly because nobody had ever went to lay hands on me or even really prayed for my hair because again, I was fine, I was healthy," she says.
Shortly after, Andrea’s teammates noticed her eyelashes were growing, but it didn’t stop there.
"At the end of October, it just was so blatant. I mean, it was all over my head like a baby’s coming in ... peach fuzz. It just kept growing, and I went back to meet with Greg, the janitor and was like, 'Keep praying, look!'"
God answered Greg and Andrea’s continued prayers for healing. I think of it as, 'What a miracle,' but then when I stop and I think, I feel like God is like, 'Andrea, I created your entire body, of course I can make your hair grow.' ”
"I love the little wispys that come in, which probably annoys everyone else, but I think it is cool because that is obviously new hair growing," she says.
Today, Andrea coaches at a Christian high school in Louisville, and unlike most of us, she welcomes the occassional “bad hair day."
My field hockey girls are really cool, the girls that I coach. You know, they got me these little plastic bows that I would put in my hair. There is normally like a big banana curl which is, I think that is my favorite part of it ... that it’s just like my mom’s."
"She [Andrea's mother] always tells me to brush it and that I need to brush it a lot, but I figure that it’s not even a year old and little one-year-olds have their hair sticking all the way up, so everyone just needs to be patient. To go 21 years without or 20 years to go completely bald, and then it grows back is something completely significant," Andrea says.
"God still heals today, and you just ask Him and He says, “You have not because you ask not,' " believes the janitor, Greg.
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