Do they shave your head for this? Nobody has mentioned my hair once and I am too embarrassed to ask

This is going to sound trivial next to what everyone else here is dealing with and I am slightly ashamed of asking it, but I have a meningioma treatment date coming and my hair has come up precisely never in any appointment.

Do they shave it? Partly? Do the pins need a bald patch? I have long thick hair that takes an hour to dry and I genuinely do not know whether to turn up with it loose, tied, plaited, or gone.

I also have my colour done every six weeks and I have no idea whether that matters at all. Feel free to tell me I am worrying about nothing.

Not trivial at all, I asked the same thing and then apologised for asking, which we should both stop doing.

Nobody shaved anything. I washed my hair the night before as instructed, turned up with it loose and clean, no products at all, and they simply parted it where the front pins went. The two sites at the back sit in the hairline and you cannot see them under hair anyway. My colour was three weeks old and not one person mentioned it.

Same here, no shaving. I was told no gel, no dry shampoo, no clips, no grips, nothing metal. Short hair so it was a non issue for me but the instruction was identical.

AVM, treated last winter, long hair, still all present and correct. I think the shaved head assumption comes from people muddling radiosurgery up with an actual operation, which is understandable given the word knife is in the name and does not belong there.

A clinical note, since this question comes up far more often than people admit and the answer is straightforward.

The head is not shaved for Gamma Knife. The beams pass through scalp and hair without any practical effect on the treatment, and the frame pins are placed through small areas of skin that are infiltrated with local anaesthetic first. What centres do ask for is clean, dry, product free hair, and no clips, grips, extensions or anything metallic, because those interfere with imaging and with positioning rather than with the radiation itself. Hair colour applied in the ordinary way beforehand is not a contraindication. Where a mask is used instead of a frame the hair is flattened by the mask but again not removed. The site's guide to preparing for Gamma Knife sets out the rest of the practical instructions in the same spirit.

Two caveats worth naming. Some people notice temporary thinning of hair in the small area where the beams enter, which typically regrows over a couple of months, and that is a separate matter from anything done on the day. And your own centre's written instructions take precedence over all of this, since protocols do differ.

Thank you, all of you. Genuinely a weight off, and the thinning point is useful to know in advance rather than discovering it in the shower in October.