Ty Ransburg couldn’t get out of his 2007 Toyota Camry.
He just sat in the driver’s seat, looking in the rearview mirror at his hair. The then-senior at Roncalli High School couldn’t get over how patchy his hair had become after his alopecia flared up again.
“I just felt kind of ugly in a way,” Ransburg said. “My confidence was so beaten down because of it. I think a lot of that was because I did that to myself, but it was really hard to look at myself and see all those imperfections.”
Alopecia, according to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, is a disease where hair follicles are targeted by the immune system, leading to hair loss.
On multiple occasions, he just gave up and drove home. Though she wasn’t pleased to see her son skip school — and would try to discipline him — Ty’s mom, Debbie Ransburg, knew he was hurting and stopped trying to force him to be comfortable.
“For months, I got a call from the parking lot,” Debbie said. “[He’d say] ‘I'm here. I'm not going in [because] I can't go in.’ That's hard for him, but I would say it's not easy for a mom either.”
Currently, Ty is a third-year organizational communications major at Ball State University and is a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE). At the start of his third year in university, his alopecia became active again. However, his mindset and attitude about the disease have drastically changed.
Ty wanted to work with SAE which would take his negative feelings about his disease and turn them into something positive. With help from his fraternity brothers, Ty and others raised $100 after they shaved their heads together.
“It's definitely scary because you don't know how [others are] gonna think or react,” Ty said. “They could not have been kinder, so it made it a lot easier.”
‘What the heck is going on?’
It started when he was just 4 years old and in preschool. Debbie found a bald spot that was almost the size of a quarter. Though he was diagnosed with alopecia, Ty didn’t initially care about it; he wasn’t a stranger to chronic disease. He also has eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), which is a chronic disease of the esophagus. It’s a genetic disease he shares with Debbie, though hers is not as severe.
“He had his first reaction to something, which was strawberries,” Debbie said. “He ate a little, tiny bite when he was one, and everywhere the juice came out, he turned into hives.”
After doing research and seeing multiple doctors, Debbie was told to take Ty to the Cincinnati Center For Eosinophilic Disorders — one of the world’s leading facilities for EoE care. The trip never phased Ty. Debbie said he was a favorite around the building and had fun with the experience.
“The nurses loved them, and he would faux hawk his hair,” she said. “He'd wear camo pants and just kind of owned [the look].”
Finally, in middle school, Ty agreed to get a feeding tube. After making the decision, he gained 20 pounds and grew four inches in three months. Due to more pressing concerns with EoE, there was not as much worry about the alopecia.
He lost eyebrows and eyelashes in elementary school, but Ty adapted with ease. That all changed in high school.
“It started at the end of my junior year of high school,” Ty said. “That’s when I first was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’”
It didn’t matter what he did; Ty was losing his hair. On multiple occasions, he woke up and noticed his pillow was covered. As it got worse, Ty tried to use different sprays to hide the thinning spots. But after a while, it became too hard to hide.
“When you only have 20 percent of your hair, you can't really cover that up,” Ty said.
Anxiety can affect the amount of hair an individual loses, including those with alopecia, according to Mayo Clinic. While trying to be an everyday teenager, Ty’s emotions began to spiral as his mental health began to take a turn for the worse.
“We couldn't wear hats in school. We had uniforms, and I couldn't really cover [the bald spots] up,” Ty said. “That was really hard, and I would just kind of be vulnerable all day. High schoolers are kind of immature sometimes.”
Debbie was in and out of the building and making phone calls, but the Roncalli staff would not let him wear a hat. Finally, they made an exception, but going into the second semester of his senior year, the Champion-branded beanie was not enough.
After going to therapy, completely shaving his head was on his mind more often. Finally, Ty decided to pull the trigger. He still recalls the feeling of the first day at school after getting the haircut.
“That’s definitely when everything kind of took a turn for the better,” Ty said. “I remember the first day I showed up for school after I shaved my head — I didn't stay. I walked in and walked out, just because it was pretty scary. But after that, I realized people just don't care. Like, it's just hair at the end of the day. It's not that big of a deal.”
But it wasn’t just the fact he lost the pressure from his peers. Ty began joking about his alopecia and was even okay with his friends doing the same.
“Once I started embracing it, I would make fun of myself,” he said. “It was easy to get people to because they didn't know if they could laugh or not. I'm like, ‘It's OK, it's funny.”’
It wasn’t just Ty that thought he was changing. Debbie watched her son, who at one point couldn’t even get out of his car some mornings, regain pride in his image. To her, people have to take moments like that as a victory.
“You celebrate every milestone,” she said. “Even the little ones.”
‘Do something good for future Ty today’
Two months after he shaved his hair for the first time, it all grew back after taking a new medication. For a while, he didn’t lose any hair, and it seemed like Ty might have been in the clear. But it returned last year with just one spot.
“It's scary every time for me once [bald spots] start coming back,” Ty said. “At first, I was like, ‘I can do this. This is fine.’ And then my spot started getting bigger, and I started noticing it more. Then, I started losing my confidence, and I just started falling apart … My whole mentality of who I was just kind of fell apart again, and I was not in a good place.”
Ty would call Debbie every day, and the two would discuss what to do this time. For Ty, the timing could not have been worse.
“I was going through some other things in my life at the same time,” he said. “My alopecia got way worse. I started losing way more hair than I probably should have been at the time. I was like, ‘Something needs to change because I'm going through a lot right now, and I need to either just shave this off or I don't know [what else to do].’”
Though he was anxious for a while, an idea dawned on him. It came from his family’s association with Tyler Trent, a former 20-year-old Purdue student who passed away from a rare form of bone cancer in 2019.
“Our daughter was president of the dance marathon at Purdue,” Debbie said. “Tyler had cancer as a 15-year-old [the first time], and when it came back right before he went to Purdue, he said, ‘I don't want to waste this time.’”
With that in mind and the notion that Ty was already going to shave his head, he wanted to do something with it. Not just for himself but as a way to help others and spread awareness.
Ty was unsure what would happen if he approached the other SAE members about the idea and disclosed what he’d dealt with throughout his life. He thought they might think differently of him.
“I didn't really know what the reactions would be,” Ty said. “Maybe they’d think I would be weird or whatever.”
But the opposite happened. Jacob Phelps, SAE’s vice president, was on board the moment Ty called him and explained the plan.
“One day, we got on a call, and he told me about [his alopecia], and I had no idea,” Phelps said.
It didn’t take long for other SAE members to join the cause. Multiple guys also shaved their heads with Ty Dec. 2, 2024, at the SAE house. While Ty wasn’t completely shocked due to his relationships within the fraternity, he wasn’t expecting them to jump in so quickly.
“It surprised me enough that I was definitely blown away by how many people did and the people that did it,” he said. “I was really grateful.”
To Debbie, seeing people who care about Ty step in to reinforce that fact is something every parent hopes for. Add in the way he’s grown since first battling alopecia, it’s another “milestone’” for her son.
“I always say to him, ‘Do something good for future Ty today,’” she said. “He’s using what he learned from senior year of high school, and that's just helpful.”
Ty himself realizes where he’s come from. Once, he was just a teenager who was too terrified to step out of his car to go to school. Now, he’s shaved his head to raise money for a disease he’s battled since he learned how to walk. And he has advice for anyone who deals with alopecia:
“Don't care what other people think,” he said. “If people aren't gonna like you because of your hair, then you don't want them in your life.”