Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

foxytaur (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by foxytaur (imported) »

Oh yeah if you get cramps on higher Spiro eat foods with rich calcium source.

B9 and folic acid suplements needed.

Electrolytes diminish so here is where I agree with you to indulge a tiny bit in salty potato chips.

(Just a tiny bit to level things off)

I love ketchup flavoured old dutch chips nummy. Haven't had these in a while.

If you haven't had ketchup flavour you don't know what your missing. They are heaaaavveeenly good P😄
Hildy_ (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by Hildy_ (imported) »

foxytaur (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 6:23 pm Usually 100mg is the avg or standard. Anything above will render T extremely low.

Your spiro must be stronger than mine then. I'm on 150 mg/day and my testosterone is at average levels.. for a male. :(

It's to be expected though; spiro blocks at the receiving end (cellular receptors) and barely if at all at the producing end (testes).
cheetaking243 (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by cheetaking243 (imported) »

Sigh... castration is looking like a better and better option with every single day, honestly. After what I've experienced for the last week straight, I am DONE with testosterone. I'm still feeling like total s*** tonight, still feeling masculine, and still feel like there's just this foggy block up there in my head keeping me from feeling "right" and feeling happy like every other normal human being on the face of the earth. It sucks so much to be back in this "dull gray drear" mindset again after being freed from it, and finally feeling like my brain was working right, for almost 2 months straight. F***. F***, f***, f***, and f*** some more, I HATE this. This seriously is going to be the longest week of my entire life. I genuinely have doubts about whether I can make it or not. The Androcur is on standby if I start feeling suicidally depressed again. I'd rather have inaccurate lab results than be dead. And yes, it really does feel that bad right now. Every single day is an absolute battle. I don't know how the hell I put up with this for 14 years of my life. I guess it was just because I didn't know any better, and didn't know that it was possible to feel a different way. I suspected that there was, but I had never experienced such a thing. But now that I have indeed experienced true happiness, and experienced what it's like to have a mind that FINALLY felt like it was working right, like that block was gone and like I was finally free to feel happy, but now that happiness is gone again, it just feels like complete and absolute torture to suffer through every single day. NOTHING makes me happy right now. At least not truly happy. The closest I can get to "happy" right now is more along the lines of "something that took my mind off the pain for a while, and it made me smile, so it made me feel a little bit better." And until the beginning of this hormone trial, that was all I ever knew as happiness, were those things that made me feel better... not really happy, but at least a bit self-fulfilled and a bit better. And again, it SUCKS to feel this way. Again, it's like my brain just is not working right anymore.

I seriously am beginning to think that my brain developed female, and that is why it has always felt wrong to have testosterone in my body, and felt like it is not working right, and why I have always identified as female. Because my mind is. It was designed to run on estrogen. And now with T getting in the way again, it's back to feeling like it's maybe working at half-capacity at best.

Sigh... I have a SERIOUS headache right now. I'm going to have to go to bed, and hope against hope that somehow I'll start feeling better again before this week is up. Again, every single day for the next week is going to be a test of endurance, as I try as absolutely hard as I can to not break out the Androcur again before my doctor's appointment next Thursday.

1 day down, 7 to go.

Argh... this seriously is going to be the worst week of my entire life.
Wolf-Pup (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by Wolf-Pup (imported) »

Well...after you have blood taken, it wouldn't be as bad to take the androcur. Eventually the estrogen should shutdown the baby makers/ I'm not sure how long that takes and everyone is different.

Keep the faith you're on the path..
transward (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by transward (imported) »

I suspect you are overthinking this. You seem to be assuming that change will be a steady, uniform progress in one direction towards your goal. That is not how biological processes, including the effects of hormones, work. If you want to see a graphic similar to how your transition under hormones will go, fire up a financial site that shows the last six month of the daily Dow Jones Average. Over that time the Dow has risen considerable, but from day to day the progress has more resembled a Drunkard's Walk, (that is how mathematicians describe such movement) Within that overall gain, there were losing and winning streaks If you continue and grow breasts, that growth will be in spurts, followed by plateaus, where you will think they are done growing. Some days they will shrink. Then they will become painful and then another growth spurt, followed by another plateau. Most processes work that way. Read the lives of the Saints. In their work towards their goals, see how many doubts they had, how often they backslid, how many demons they had to wrestle. Look at the way the tide comes in, a wave comes in, retreats, then comes in a little further. If you are plotting your weight loss, it will have the same pattern.

The way you seem to be taking your emotional temperature daily makes it far too easy to miss the forest while looking at the trees. Your body has at least a dozen other hormones. Science has identified a number of different biological rhythms. Your weight may fluctuate 3-4 pounds as your body retains and eliminates water. Trying to evaluate the effects of E and blockers daily in the midst of all these changes is like trying to see the long term effects of climate change by looking at day to day temperatures. It is only by looking at the the effects over a greater period of time that you can get an accurate picture. This is why most weight loss programs advise against weighing yourself every day.

Plus it leads to a sort of emotional or spiritual hypochondria. If you look too hard for symptoms, you will find them whether you have them or not. Remember before you started hormones. You had up days and down days. Days you felt you could conquer the world, and days you felt you were lost before you got out of bed. Almost everybody does. But now that you are experimenting with hormones, those day to day changes have to be a rise in T levels. (though I agree your dose of Spiro is low, particularily on a dose per kg. basis. According to info on this site
12114-Due-to-requests-chemical-castration-protocal-with-optional-levels-of-feminizing "To Lower Testosterone: 100mg 2x Day Spirotone (Spironolactone)" and I have seen some doctors prescribe more) I would suggest doing the kind of self evaluation you are doing no more often than every 10 day or so.

You talked of not trying to be someone else and being yourself. There is an unstated premise here that you know who you are. But for most of us trans folk that is what we are exploring to discover. If everybody knew who they were, Socrates would not have had to tell his students that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and "know thyself," advice that was already ancient when he spoke. You learned how to walk and talk and act through a stimulus response cycle with the world. A girl child flounces, and giggles and tosses her hair; adults smile and radiate approval A boy child doing the same is met with frowns and disapproval. At puberty a girl sticks out her chest and swing he hips and gets lots of positive attention and rewards. A boy behaving thus gets beat up. Without a word passing the children are being trained in their gender roles. If you try to break that conditioning, it is going to feel unnatural at first. You will feel like you are trying to be someone else. But that is not the real "who you are" Learning who you are is like peeling an onion. You keep finding new layers of being. And for us it is not only a process of discovery, it is also an act of creation. We are creative artists and our art form is ourselves.

So between your periodic self examinations, I would suggest what contemplatives call self observation. Watch yourself, not from the inside, what you think you are, but like studying a stranger, like Jane Goodall observing chimps in Africa. Just watch. Objectively see how you behave, not how you think you behave. Close observation will probably show you you do not behave the way you think you do. People who think they are self controlled go berserk when cut off in traffic. We all lie far more to ourselves than we do to others.

Good luck. Have fun. Don't take yourself too seriously.

Transward
Jorge2008 (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by Jorge2008 (imported) »

It's rather one of those ''your mileage will vary'' things. If I remember correctly, I ended up taking 250 mg of Spiro with zero effect.
Hildy_ (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 10:38 pm Your spiro must be stronger than mine then. I'm on 150 mg/day and my testosterone is at average levels.. for a male. :(

It's to be expected though; spiro blocks at the receiving end (cellular receptors) and barely if at all at the producing end (testes).
cheetaking243 (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by cheetaking243 (imported) »

Transward, I really do appreciate the support, and the attempt to make me feel better.

But by this point, I believe that there is little doubt left that this mood swing is indeed a T recovery. You're 100% right, I didn't know what it was for several days. I thought it was just my moods going up and down. It was only by looking at the long-term pattern, and started looking at the continuous symptoms, that I started to realize what was going on.

If this was just a few days, I would understand how it could be seen as overreacting. But I believe that the pattern is completely unmistakable. It has now been EIGHT days since I've felt feminine, and felt that same sense of mental calm that I had for what was close to a month straight while I was still on Androcur. And you're 100% right, this change did happen like a stock-market fluctuation. On the way up, it was a slow steady climb, with a lot of setbacks along the way. My moods were seriously up and down for the first month and a half, before they finally evened out. And even then, I absolutely did still backtrack on a couple of random days for no good reason, but the overall trend was indeed still up. Well, now the overall trend has NOT been up anymore, it has been down. I started out this prescription dosage not feeling masculine every day, and still having streaks of some good days. But the overall trend has been down. Every time I have these depressive bouts now, and these masculine feelings, the duration keeps getting longer and longer, and the feeling keeps getting worse and worse, with every single downswing.

And right now, there really are some obvious external signs that I'm fighting with T... not just the moods. First of all, my metabolism has clearly gone way back up. Again, I had THREE junk days last week. And yet I still lost 3 lbs. It used to take a good 3 or 4 days of being strict on the diet before I'd lose the weight back from ONE junk day. And I'm feeling warmer again. I've been back to sweating in my work uniform on a daily basis instead of shivering. The muscle fatigue that I was experiencing for so long after work because of muscle atrophy has gone away. Physically, even after staying overtime twice in a row, physically I felt absolutely fine. Breast soreness has significantly diminished. Last week, I couldn't even run because they were getting so sore that any sort of bouncing hurt, and applying any sort of pressure hurt a LOT. Yesterday, I actually hit myself right in the boob to test the level of soreness, and it barely hurt at all. My skin has become more oily and grimy again, (and that is actually why I reported that for some reason my face looked different. It wasn't the shape that was different, it was the skin texture, and the oiliness coming back. That's why it suddenly looked masculine again.) My hair has also regained its oiliness. I'm having to wash it more often because it gets clumpy and rigid due to natural oiliness, where a month ago I was consistently going 3 full days without washing it and it STILL looked great! Also, For the past 2 weeks, I had been feeling this strange pain in my hips, like the tendons and ligaments were trying to change configuration or something. That is completely gone now.

So again, I appreciate the support, but this isn't just some minor hormonal flux that will go away, and isn't just a small little blip in the radar before it will start going back up again. This really is a case of the trend having reversed, and it's been going down and down and down ever since I switched to this current prescription.

(Side note: I am feeling better today so far. And despite all of this negativity that I am reporting, I do not think that my T levels have recovered fully, nor are they going to. Because I am still able to feel this sense of mental calmness from time to time. It's just
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Tue Apr 09, 2013 11:10 am getting less and less frequent. A
nd there are tha
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:56 am nkfully some symptoms that have
NOT come back. I am still not getting spontaneous erections, I haven't regrown any body hair, and the shape of my body has not changed whatsoever, it is still very much feminine. (Nor will it have time to. That would take MUCH longer.) So really what I believe is going on here is just a moderate temporary T-level recovery, enough to remind me how s***ty it feels, but not quite enough to reverse any of the significant changes that have occurred already. And as long as I get it fixed soon, I don't have anything to worry about in that regard. I just have to get over the mental challenge.)

In a way, I guess that I'm glad that this is happening, because it is once again giving me a little taste of what my old life was like, reminding me of exactly what I was so desperate
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Sat Feb 09, 2013 9:46 pm to escape from in the first place. And
it is DEFINITELY making my convictions to transition much stronger. An
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 10:52 pm d despite how much it sucks in t
he time being,
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:56 am this is going to be a VERY important feel
ing to remember. Because it's probably the last time that I'm EVER going to feel this masculine "dull gray drear" mindset again. So remembering what it's like, and remembering this little taste of the life that I came from in the first place, will be very important once I start getting used to the feeling of mental clarity again, reminding me of why I can't ever go back there, despite any doubts that I might be having.
foxytaur (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by foxytaur (imported) »

Hildy_ (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 10:38 pm Your spiro must be stronger than mine then. I'm on 150 mg/day and my testosterone is at average levels.. for a male. :(

It's to be expected though; spiro blocks at the receiving end (cellular receptors) and barely if at all at the producing end (testes).

Gee im not even on hormones yet. I usully talk with other trans friends. they just tell me stuff varies from person to person. I think height plays a factor too in how much should be deemed effective per person along with androgen sensitivity.

I don' want to go on an excessively high spiro dosage. But neither want my E to lower o the point of ineffectiveness.It isn't a full blown hatred for T.

😄

NB = What you want me to loose sex drive completely?
cheetaking243 (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by cheetaking243 (imported) »

Oh, YAY!!! I just felt feminine again! For the first time in days! When I was stretching out on my bed just now, suddenly I had this "flash" again, where I could feel myself completely feminized for just a split second, and LOVED what I was feeling.

And after that, I looked in the mirror, and for the first time in days it didn't depress me.

Man... so much of this is mental. SO... Freaking... much. Perhaps what's driving me so nuts isn't the actual re-masculinization, which has been VERY minor at best, and quite possibly a complete mental fabrication at worst, but rather just that mental mindset that I'm not making progress anymore. Because it really does seem like on all of my best days, those were the days that I felt the most confident, the days where I was the most sure that I really was going to get exactly the body that I had always wanted, and the days where I felt like I had made progress in the appearance department, and could clearly see a happy future ahead of me. Where my depressive days were the days where I was having doubts, the days where I didn't feel confident that it really was going to work, caught up on being afraid of not looking good, and caught up on doubts about whether my dysphoria would EVER go away and whether I ever would be truly female or not.

So yeah... a lot of this depression is admittedly my own doing, just because I'm hung up on that feeling of not making any progress, and hung up on that lack of a feminine feeling, and the more I think about it the more it bothers me. That admittedly is how my mind works now. I really get hung up on certain thoughts, and I take them WAY too far. And this happens both ways. There's some days where I really don't start out happy, but suddenly I start getting hung up on the fantasy, and realize that it's becoming real, and I start imagining everything PERFECT, and it sends me into this crazy uber-happiness that then fades away quickly when the reality comes back. And there's also some days where I really don't start out feeling bad, but then I get caught up on the doubts, and on the uncertainty, and on certain hateful words that others have said, and suddenly I'm spiraling into depression because I'm freaking out about the possibility of never being happy with myself.

Yeah... what can I say? I've been a total drama queen through this entire thing. And I really need to chill out. These endless highs and lows are not healthy. Maybe Transward is right. Maybe I really do need to quit writing and quit self-assessing EVERY single day. Because it really does make these peaks and valleys MUCH worse than they have any right to be.

God... it feels so good to finally feel like I have my rational mind back, and finally have my self-identity back, after so many days of being caught in this endless depressive spiral.

(And hell, this in itself is just another stupid mood swing. I'm just so back-and-forth, so all over the place, so scatter-brained, so completely dominated by stupid little emotional fluxes, it's absolutely ridiculous. And I do feel like the hormones are playing a part in this. My mind, and the way that I think, has DEFINITELY changed. Just the fact that I am able to feel this low, and feel this high, is a sign of my changing reality. I NEVER felt highs or lows this strongly before HRT. And I NEVER cried real, actual weeping tears before, only ones that never came out. And those tears are still coming despite how "masculine" I have been feeling this week. So this in itself should be a sign that I really have feminized to a significant degree. I really am acting like a teenage girl right now, one who hasn't quite learned to control her own hormonally-confused mind yet. And when I get depressed, I REALLY over-exaggerate it. I've noticed this is a common thing among pre-hormone FtM transsexuals on Susan's, is that their first response to hardship is a particular kind of bitter, weepy, "I give up" depression, feeling like it's hopeless, rather than the more male mindset of tackling it rationally and trying to work through it. So again, this in itself should be an indication that things really have changed. I NEVER would have been this way just a few short months ago.)

Sigh... again, this is just such a confusing time. I need some certainty back in my life, and even if my hormones aren't actually the cause of these extreme ups and downs, I really do need
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:56 am
cheetaking243 (imported [/quote] ) wrote:Tue Apr 09, 2013 11:10 am to go on a higher dose of Spiro
just in order to restore some certainty into my life. That is what I am missing. It's that certainty about what my T levels are doing. I knew for sure what my T levels were doing while I was on full doses of A
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2013 7:15 am ndrocur, where right now I have no i
dea what the hell is going on, and it
cheetaking243 (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2013 3:55 pm is driving me absolutely insane,
to the point of borderline-suicidal depressive bouts. Yeah. I need that certainty. I need to have that feeling deep down that tells me I'm making progress.

Anyway, those are my daily thoughts. I am still VERY conflicted today, and my moods just don't seem to know what to do. They still feel muted and like they're not working quite right, but at the same time I did just finally feel feminine again, and feel like things are calming down a bit. And just writing this entry, and realizing how "feminine" these depressive bouts have been, makes me feel better about it, because it does feel like it is coming from my true self. But who the hell knows if this feeling will last or not, given the increasingly-chaotic state of my brain recently. Again, it feels like my brain is a soupy mess of E and T right now, and can't seem to decide which hormone it wants to listen to.

Sigh... whatever. I'll make it through this. Sorry for being such a drama queen. :p And sorry for that SEVERELY over-exaggerated depressive post last night. I had a headache, and felt like crap at the time, so I admittedly took it a bit too far just in order to get some of the hurt out.

Sorry.

-Carrie
Hildy_ (imported)
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Re: Cheetaking243's Official Hormone Trial!

Post by Hildy_ (imported) »

I think there's also something else going on. You've only figured out that this is right for you a couple of months ago, remember? To give you a bit of an idea, here's my recent history:

In my country all gender dysphoria treatment is done through two gender teams, each treating people from their own region. After literally years of depression, worry and doubts I finally applied to "my" gender team at the end of last year (29 november, a thursday, chilly but sunny). What happened next was that I barely slept for an entire month, lost 16 lbs in two months because of the nausea of stress alone (turns out I'm whatever the opposite of a stress-eater is) and it's taken me up to this week to finally be able to focus my mind on other things again, like my housekeeping, or the server in my storage room that was dead for 2 months.

According to the therapist I've been seeing for a couple of years because of this, that's quite normal. According to him, extreme mood swings, euphoria, increased dysphoria, it's all part of the package of finally admitting to yourself that you're really going to do this. He's seen it all before, and he reassured me that it does become easier to function again after a while.

And you know what, he's right. For me, this was necessary to blow the doors clean off my mental closet, where I pushed everything away. Slowly but surely I'm becoming ready to deal with this; able to talk and reason about all this as an adult. And slowly starting to accept that I'm not going to be a cis girl, I'll be a trans girl, with my current bodily configuration, uncomfortable as I am with it, as starting point and forever dependent on exogenous hormones. I cannot get what I always wanted: a nanotechnology-assisted transition leaving me with an as-good-as-cis body, in a society where that's not merely normal but even somewhat hip (where do you think my signature comes from?). What I can get is hopefully something I can live with, instead of what I have now.

Carrie, your posts have helped me a lot. The revelation you made a while ago, about transitioning being about being yourself; I made that conclusion tentatively a while ago (I even wrote it on the whiteboard I have in my hallway: "you're a tomboy"), and seeing you basically figuring out that and other stuff has helped me grow quite a bit. So let me help you here; take it from me, though your current anti-androgen dose is obviously next-to-nothing, and it's obviously doing something to your mind, I don't think that's the only thing causing your mood swings.

Please, take your time in coming to terms with being trans, since I don't think it's all sunken in yet. This is not easy; trust me, I've taken the long route (I first started seeking help in 2006) and it's still difficult for me. The sheer fear of being rejected when telling people close to me that basically the person they've always seen is a lie, the worries of plainly not being accepted or being thrown to the wayside by society, wanting to run away from all this yet knowing I cannot live on like this, it's all weighing on me heavily. And it's a real fear too, going to the core of my being. Because this is it.

Anyway, hope this helps. Have strength, sister 🤗
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