0) Where are you from (country)?
Finland.
1) How did you find this forum?
From the side-effects part of hairloss.com forum and initially through my own research on finasteride.
2) What is your current age, height, weight?
Age 21, height 184cm, weight ~78kg (varies by one or two kilos.). Slim guy.
3) Do you excercise regularly? If so, what type of excercise?
I don’t but planned to do so now to avoid detoriation and to increase testo.
4) What type of diet do you eat (vegetarian, meat eater, raw, fast-food/organic healthy)?
Balanced diet/organic food with salads, sometimes rye bread.
5) Why did you take Finasteride (hair loss, BPH, other)?
Hair loss.
6) For how long did you take Finasteride (weeks/months/years)?
1 month!
7) How old were you when you started Finasteride?
21
8) How old were you when you quit?
21
9) How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)?
Cold turkey.
10) What type of Finasteride did you use – Propecia, Proscar, Fincar or other generic?
Gefina - basically finasteride that you cut with a pillcutter into four pills consisting of 1.25mg finasteride.
11) What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)?
1.25 every day. 1/4 of the 5 mg pill every day.
12) How long into your use of Finasteride did you notice the onset of side effects?
I think two weeks before the end of it i noticed slight erection problems and arousal problems? At the last week my sex drive went through the roof and maybe due to it i was anxious too. 'Kept getting more severe until at the very end my ejaculation was watery and my full erection was rubbery/soft! Yikes!
13) What side effects did you experience while on the drug that have yet to resolve since discontinuation?
Put an X beside all that apply:
Sexual
[X] Loss of Libido / Sex Drive
[X] Erectile Dysfunction
[ ] Complete Impotence
[N] Loss of Morning Erections
[X] Loss of Spontaneous Erections
[?] Loss of Nocturnal Erections
[*] Watery Ejaculate
[X] Reduced Ejaculate
[ ] Inability to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[?] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility
Mental
[] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat
[N] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating
[ ] Confusion
[N] Memory Loss / Forgetfullness
[?] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[ ] Slurring of Speech
[] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[N] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks
[N] Depression / Melancholy
Physical
[X] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled)
[?] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[N] Testicular Pain
[?] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness
[X] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease
[ ] Weight Gain
[?] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[?] Muscle Wastage
[?] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[N] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes
Misc
[ ] Prostate pain
[N] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion
[ ] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[N] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[ ] Increased hair loss
[ ] Frequent urination
[?] Lowered body temperature
[?] Other (please explain)
Adrenal fatigue? Worsening hypothyroidism due to it?
14) What (if any) treatments have you undertaken to recover from your side effects since discontinuation of the drug?
*Zinc-picolite 60mg (maybe ~70mg due to food containing it?) every day for a month, between November 22th to December 14th.
*Creatine monohydrate ~35mg for a week, from 5th to 12th of December. I meant to take 25mg but i didn’t have a teaspoon with me so i estimated it wrong! This proved some good results though.
*I also increased thyroxin dosage from 25mg to 50mg at the third week (of the one month use) which is propably somewhere between 1th and 6th of November?
[b]15) If you have pre or post-Finasteride bloodtests, what hormonal changes have you encountered since discontinuing the drug (pls post your test results in
the “Blood Tests” section and link to them in your post)?[/b]
I do not have any. 
Only TSH and T4V prior to fin and during it.
16) Anything not listed in the above questions you’d like to share about your experience with Finasteride?
17) Tell us your story, in your own words, about your Finasteride usage and side effects experienced while on/off the drug.
Okay. I apologize the army of dates but i was sharp with this. I wanted to recover quickly as possible so i payed close attention to everything.
I started using finasteride at 18th of October 2010 (10.18.2010) and i quit at 19th of November (11.19.2010). I used it for a whole month (30 days). That happened 2.7 months ago and i haven’t recovered sexually from it for a whole lot. Besides, my condition is getting worse!
My hypothyroidism got worse all of sudden around two weeks into my school life, which is propably 1-6 of November? So my thyroxin dosage was increased from 25mg to 50mg every day.
At 9th of November/Around two weeks before i quit i noticed slight erection problems and arousal problems. I assumed that they would pass and so at the last week of my fin use, my sex drive went through the roof!
Maybe due to it i was anxious too. Sexual problems kept getting more severe until at the very end my ejaculation was watery and my full erection was rubbery/soft! Yikes!
Because of this incident, i furiously searched for an answer to this which is when i found the permanent side-effects - thing.
Enden from hairloss.com advised me to drop the finasteride altogether. Couple of days i was fine but then i crashed.
Symptons at that time (beginning): Emotional flatness (notable); No more sexual or affection fantasies; Penis shrinkage; Genital numbness; No morning erections; No spontaneus erections or visual arousal; No arousal/pleasure from masturbation; No sexuality; Lack of energy; Depression and Anxiety. Rubbery erection and watery ejaculation propably got fixed pretty soon as i quit.
From Enden’s recommendation i started my recovery with zinc supplements at November 22th - apparently, a large amount of zinc (50-100mg) would act as an aromatose inhibitor to estrogen. It was assumed that my estrogen was high and we wanted that the morning erections would appear again.
In the following few weeks after fin my energy levels improved VASTLY/GREATLY and i became more lively and present. This time overlaps with the time when i used creatine too. First morning erections came back at 26th to 31th of November but they were still limp or vague.
Enden recommended an experimantation with creatine monohydrate because of this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19741313. Since we wanted the DHT to get a raise over estrogen to avoid the bad side-effects of high estrogen, I followed the recommendation of the study at used ~35mg every day from 5th to 12th of December. I meant to take 25mg but i didn’t have a teaspoon with me so i estimated it wrong! There was however no damage from this as the creatine
overdose would result to a short-term diarhea.
At 8th of December i had a good twist of events: I had a raging boner in a train after having none for a long time! Pretty soon after my penis size returned to normal and my morning erections almost returned. I DID do some clumsy practises of kegel exercises prior to that but i doubt that was it that worked so well. Enden commented that DHT had affected his penis size so we assumed that weeks big progress was because of creatine. I commented that the occurances of visual stimulation -> boner starts happened constantly even though i did not feel sexual excitement from it or didn’t feel the visual provosal. This was kind of weird in retrospect!
14th December (two days after the end of creatine round) Enden warned me about not driving estrogen too low and around this time i had a really bad flu and a fever. Possibly due to the fever, it was really hard to even manually arouse my penis so i concluded that gulp it’s the estrogen! So i quit zinc.
Note, at this point i tried to get a medical center doc to do me some blood tests but besides being forcible to her (in retrospect), she didn’t know a whole lot about hormones and didn’t believe my story despite my genuine desperation.
So since i knew that i’d have hard time getting those tests or to get docs on this case, i believed that i could handle this on my own in time with just phases of creatine and zinc whenever my estrogen got high and dht was low. That time would heal whatever it could, taking it with a grace and do things to improve my state. I regret this decicion.
On the other hand - the following month after quitting of zinc was pleasant! My sexuality and mental health stabiled. No spontaneus erections but morning erections were back in full force. My penis was in a good size! Pleasure and fantasying during/from masturbation was possible. I felt even sexuality was improving and i had a taste for sexual pleasure again. Excitement from girls. Good energy levels.
All in all, steady but small progress in every way. Nothing disastrous as what others had described. Optimisms. I could LIVE with this, i thought.
This lasted for about a month and… a week i guess.
–
At the end of the good month, i noticed that my penis was once again getting smaller? (10th-16th January) Plus i was getting bit more doglike, could easily masturtabe two times a day (20th January)! This is when i sensed that it was a warning sign and my suspicions arose - To my knowledge, when estrogen was high it initially shows as a fake spike in sexual drive. Okay, i thought, so i just use zinc to drop estrogen and start creatine again after a month of wait to improve my penis. However, i guess my symptons were not clear since i only took zinc some odd days.
20th of January or a day or two ahead, My penis kept shrinking and the veins on it disapeared - on top of that, my ejaculation production dropped to half! I still had good morning erections but then again, there was a small sharp pain in the right side of my groinal area for couple of days.
All this made more desperate and i again asked Enden for advise. He and other people told me to finally get my hormones mapped since my symptons could be low estrogen as well!
So I took zinc pills for a couple of days until i was convinced that i’d need to be clean for the lab tests and to see if my condition improved without them (low estrogen).
(In retrospect, a funny episode happened at 26th to 28th: recently i had started taking multivitamin pills besides zinc had 15mg zinc. I didn’t realize this so i got similiar experiences to low blood sugar but much more severe from 8pm to 12pm sharp! I must have had taken like 75mg or more during that time (since normal food has zinc in it) I don’t have them now and i think it’s safe to assume that it was zinc overdose.)
24th to 30th of January i took creatine monohydrate again, this time with the correct dosage of 25mg a day. My sexuality was ceasing at this point and even DURING the creatine (!). Nothing special happened for couple of days and i still had morning erections. One morning i woke up with a roaring morning erection so i assumed things would of course improve.
–
January 27th the pain in the right side of groin was still there along with strange feelings in my nuts.
January 28th a drastic change happened: Sexual arousal was hard and it was hard to fantasize and my morning erections were getting vague at this point. February 1th my ejaculation amount was normal but it had changed to mostly transparent. Arousal was almost impossible and my penis felt nothing now! At this point i observed that my penis might not have actually returned to original size as i had assumed. I also had felt sensation of sensitivity in my left nipple at this point, whatever it means…
February 7th, this is what i wrote: “Smaller penis right now along, erection (hard to achieve now) lasts only a short time, hard to get aroused/even manually please my penis. My sack/testicles are close to groin most of time, not feeling so energetic. Balls and penis feels different/cold (shrinking?), my chest area is tinkling/my left nipple still feels like it’s getting more sensitive. Perhaps false alarm but worsening left eye (ergo suspecting high prolactin but it could be natural too). Still good amount of prostrate fluid but it’s almost transparent. Not watery, thank god for that.”
February 9th: “I’ve been worse lately: lack of energy, lack of drive, needing more sleep, “droopy” eyesight, anxiety (i’d say this since considering that when i was fine i wasn’t constantly concerned or feeling like sh*t like right now), smaller penis (like i mentioned), smaller balls i guess. strange, stinging feel in balls? not cold yet. It’s not even halfway through the month before next creatine week! So something is wrong. Perhaps this is once again affecting my thyroid levels too? I guess manual arousal is easier now than what it was when it was almost impossible.
for the past two weeks my eyesight has been feeling different, like uh either droopy right eye or left eye. Bad nightsight now. Harder to focus/blurry. For short times/randomly i get a small headache! Like right now. It might be something else than prolactin though.”
Now it’s February 11th.
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