It’s been more than 6 months since I last updated here – figured I’d share what’s been happening and what I’ve tried.
To update: I saw Dr. Jacobs last fall and in November began T injections. The initial result was amazing: My libido/sexual function were fully restored about 2 days after the first shot. The it would kind of come and go in waves over the next few weeks. One day would be bad, the next I’d get erections easily just thinking about sex. But after those few weeks, the sexual effect just seemed to wear off. I’ve continued taking the shots since then, dosage and frequency have even been upped, but I get absolutely no sexual boost from them. None.
But I’m still taking the injections because they seem to be clearly helping with what became an awful issue for me after I quit Propecia last June (more than a year now – hard/depressing to believe). Basically, within a few days of quitting the drug, I had this constant need to pee – I mean it would come in within 10 minutes of going. The smallest amount in my bladder I would feel. I could have gone 100 times a day if I wanted to. I can’t explain adequately how awful this was. And I saw countless urologists, took all sorts of bladder relaxers, had all sorts of invasive tests and they could figure out nothing. But when I took the T shot in November, the problem improved incredibly. I still will have some bad days – and I even had a stretch in February and March when all of the urinary stuff seemed to come back, but that’s when we upped the dosage and it steadily improved. Today, most days, I have no complaints about the peeing stuff. And really, this was a huge issue for me. This wasn’t having to go to the bathroom a few extra times a day. This was just contast, unending torture. And the T, for whatever reason, seems to be the only thing that helps it.
My guess: Finasteride works on the prostate, we know that. So when I stopped the drug, it caused some kind of immediate change in my prostate – hence the peeing issues starting like 5 days after quitting. But it wasn’t a classic swollen prostate – every urologist who examined me said the prostate was normal size, shouldn’t be causing peeing issues. And I did a long course of antibiotics just in case. Still, I have a feeling the pee thing is prostate-related and related to quitting…and somehow the T has a healthful effect on the prostate. (I’ve actually found a medical paper online that talks about testosterone helping men with lower urinary tract symptoms.)
As for the libido side of things…just frustration. Jacobs has also tried some anti-anxiety pills with me, to no avail. I had one random 3-4 day stretch in March when libido seemed to come back on line, but otherwise it’s status quo. I can masturbate, but I’m usually not that hard. I can wake up with very hard erections, but they go away immediately upon awakening. On most days, if I concentrate hard during the day, really hard, I can get an erection thinking erotic thoughts…but it will also go away very fast. My basic appetite for sex, my sexual energy, just doesn’t exist anymore.
You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure this out. I see people here who talk about dietary changes, exercise regimens, autoimmune diseases, all sorts of specific hormonal imbalances, changes in brain chemistry. I have no great theory, but I will say that it seems important that the first shot of Testosterone really did bring back my sexual health. It didn’t last…but for a a while there, I thought I had solved my problem. (Can’t even begin to describe how happy that time was…) So it seems to me there’s got to be an important role for testosterone in all of this. Although, again, my bioavailable count is now sky high an I;m getting nothing sexually from it, so there’s that.
One thing I still wonder about: I was (in retrospect) having all sorts of Propecia issues for the first year I was on the drug. (I was on for a total of 15 months.) Sweating was just out of control, I gained a lot of fat around my belly/hips, just never made the connection until after. But it wasn’t until an emotionally traumatic episode – the most emotionally traumatic episode of my life, suddenly getting dumped by someone I had incredibly deep, longstanding feelings for – that my libido went. I still remember it well – it was last May (2012). We didn’t have sex the night I was dumped (not surprisingly) and I remember thinking to myself after that I’d probably have a strong urge to masturbate the next day. But I was also a mess for the next few days, barely sleeping, stressed out like never before, crying at random times…and then like a week later I just realized that I hadn’t masturbated or had the urge to masturbate since getting dumped. I chalked it up to the stressful episode – again, didn’t think Propecia. It was only a month later, when I randomly told a doctor about my Propecia use, that all the pieces came together and I quit immediately. I had no post-quitting surge/crash – something Ive noticed other here describe – but my libido just didn’t change. Basically, it’s been in a severely lowered state since that break-up in May '12. Except for when I had the first T shot.
I doubt that my libido issues are just a result of stress/anxiety. It’s been more than a year, I’d have to think there’d be some variance if it was just stress.anxiety. But I wonder if there was some kind of combination of forces at work – where the stressful breakup episode “broke” a system that had been altered by Propecia? Or something like that.
One final note: There were other changes that occurred after quitting. I do not sweat nearly as intensely as I did while on the drug, but my sweat now smells like vinegar. If I go running and then launder my clothes, you can still smell the vinegar. I run this by doctors and they shrug, but I think it must be a clue - taking the drug made me sweat buckets (but the sweat didn’t smell like vinegar); withdrawing it at first made me stop sweating almost completely (for like a week) and then when I started sweating again, it smelled like vinegar.
So that’s where I am now. I guess I’ll keep taking the T, even though it has no effect on libido. It’s good not to have the urinary stuff be much of a problem anymore. I wonder about trying progesterone, or DHT supplementation, or any of the many other things others on here have tried. But it just seems kind of pointless – I follow every thread on here, and they always seem to lead to dead ends.