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Member Stories
#1

  1. Where are you from (country)? Uk

  2. How did you find this forum (Google search – if so, what search terms? Via link from a forum or website – if so, what page? Other?) Hairloss forums, mew and enden debating with endless fools

  3. What is your current age, height, weight? 25/ 5’7 / 10st/140lb

  4. Do you excercise regularly? If so, what type of excercise? Try and lift weights and walk a lot

  5. What type of diet do you eat (vegetarian, meat eater, raw, fast-food/organic healthy)? Not fantastic, trying to eat better

  6. Why did you take Finasteride (hair loss, BPH, other)? Hairloss

  7. For how long did you take Finasteride (weeks/months/years)? Seven years on and off

  8. How old were you, and WHEN (date) did you start Finasteride? Seventeen, can’t remember the exact date

  9. How old were you when you quit, and WHEN (date) did you quit? 25 the last time

  10. How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)? I only took two halves

  11. What type of Finasteride did you use – Propecia, Proscar, Fincar or other generic? Fincar and propecia

  12. What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)? 1.25mg when I first started, half that later on and towards the end .5mg half propecia pill.

  13. How long into your use of Finasteride did you notice the onset of side effects? I suppose I noticed some side effects gradually develop as I got older. I didn’t see any improvements whilst off the drug (eight months or more sometimes) so I thought nothing of it.

  14. 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 (I can get to about 50% with stimulation)
[/] Loss of Morning Erections (don’t really recall these even before propecia. Maybe once or twice?)
[/] Loss of Spontaneous Erections (same as above, I don’t recall that many before)
[/] Loss of Nocturnal Erections (not sure. I assume so)
[ ] Watery Ejaculate
[ ] Reduced Ejaculate
[ ] Inability to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[ ] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility

Mental
[X] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat
[X] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating
[ ] Confusion
[ ] Memory Loss / Forgetfullness
[X] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[ ] Slurring of Speech
[X] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[x] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks
[X] Severe Depression / Melancholy
[ ] Suicidal Thoughts

Physical
[X] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled) cold glans
[ ] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[ ] Testicular Pain
[X] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness not sure if I’m imagining or not yet
[X] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease
[ ] Weight Gain
[ ] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[ ] Muscle Wastage
[ ] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[X] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes

Misc
[X] Prostate pain
[X] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion
[X] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[ ] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[ ] Increased hair loss
[X] Frequent urination
[ ] Lowered body temperature

[ ] Other (please explain)

  1. What (if any) treatments have you undertaken to recover from your side effects since discontinuation of the drug?
    None, visiting my gp again tomorrow but it doesn’t seem likely to help

  2. 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)? None, plan to get some asap

  3. Anything not listed in the above questions you’d like to share about your experience with Finasteride?

  4. Tell us your story, in your own words, about your Finasteride usage and side effects experienced while on/off the drug.

I first took finasteride in 2007 as I started losing my hair, I did a bit of research on the forums and apart from some occasional mentions of potential lingering sides all seemed safe so I booked an appt with my doctor. The doctor refered me to my local dermatologist. The derm examined my head, told me I had male pattern baldness and suggested rogaine or propecia. I didn’t want to take the rogaine as it was greasy and horrible and a pill seemed convenient. Fast forward over the next seven years or so. I took several breaks along the way and I hadn’t noticed any sides. Felt a bit depressed along the way but nothing that seemed abnormal. I was off the propecia during the majority of the last two years or so.
Recently my hair started shedding pretty dramatically so I dug out some pills is had in the drawer for a while and figured i’d start up again as I didn’t think it really caused a problem. Took an eighth of a fincar and was fine, planning to take it EOD until I ordered some propecia from boots online. The Sunday before last I woke up with a start after very little sleep and have been unable to sleep properly even with medication (zopiclone) or gain a proper erection since. Sorry I haven’t worked harder on this ijuat can’t really concentrate rigjt now.

#2

Normal blood tests booked. Not sure what’s going down yet. No improvements so far.

#3

Hey sorry to see you struggling and on this forum

I’m from the Uk too

PM if you ever want to chat or want any advice

I was hit very hard by this poison and I’m still not right 19 months off

#4

Thank you. I’m just trying to relax at the moment but I’ve got a feeling I’ll be messaging you very soon

#5

Does anyone know of any decent doctors in the UK who are receptive to this situation?

#6

  1. Where are you from (country)? Uk

  2. How did you find this forum (Google search – if so, what search terms? Via link from a forum or website – if so, what page? Other?) Hairloss forums, mew and enden debating with endless fools

  3. What is your current age, height, weight? 25/ 5’7 / 10st/135lb

  4. Do you excercise regularly? If so, what type of excercise? Nothing right now apart from lots of brisk walking. I plan to start a gym routine as soon as I feel stable.

  5. What type of diet do you eat (vegetarian, meat eater, raw, fast-food/organic healthy)? Working on adopting a paleo/bulletproof style diet.

  6. Why did you take Finasteride (hair loss, BPH, other)? Hairloss

  7. For how long did you take Finasteride (weeks/months/years)? Seven years on and off

  8. How old were you, and WHEN (date) did you start Finasteride? Seventeen, can’t remember the exact date

  9. How old were you when you quit, and WHEN (date) did you quit? 25 the last time

  10. How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)? I only took two halves

  11. What type of Finasteride did you use – Propecia, Proscar, Fincar or other generic? Fincar and propecia

  12. What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)? 1.25mg when I first started, half that later on and towards the end .5mg half propecia pill.

  13. How long into your use of Finasteride did you notice the onset of side effects? I suppose I noticed some side effects gradually develop as I got older. I didn’t see any improvements whilst off the drug (eight months or more sometimes) so I thought nothing of it.

  14. 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 - I have some libido when my girlfriend is concerned but the rest of the time I’m pretty much asexual unless I make myself think about it
[X] Erectile Dysfunction
[ ] Complete Impotence - it just about works if I force it.
[/] Loss of Morning Erections (don’t really recall these even before propecia. Maybe once or twice?)
[/] Loss of Spontaneous Erections (same as above, I don’t recall that many before)
[/] Loss of Nocturnal Erections I’ve woken up from rem sleep (I was dreaming) several times with one, from what I’ve read so far it seems that nocturnals occur during rem sleep. I don’t recall many dreams before this so it’s probably safe to assume everything was a-ok before and I just happened to mostly awaken during a different phase of sleep.
[ ] Watery Ejaculate
[ ] Reduced Ejaculate - This is really hard to say because I was on and off of the drug for a very long time. Longest period off was around eight months.
[ ] Inability to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[ ] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility

Mental
[X] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat - This has improved somewhat but I still don’t really care about anything short of the extremes but I’ll take it for now.
[X] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating - I’m having to work twice as hard to focus on much of anything and it’s exhausting.
[ ] Confusion
[ ] Memory Loss / Forgetfullness
[X] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[ ] Slurring of Speech
[X] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[x] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks - These have gone away mostly.
[X] Severe Depression / Melancholy - Mostly gone unless I eat a really carby meal. Weird.
[X] Suicidal Thoughts - This has been very disturbing. Suicide seems a totally logical option at the moment, even though it just fucking isn’t. I refuse.

Physical
[X] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled) Couple of bouts of extreme shrinkage, lots of new darkened veins (Maybe thinning skin?) whatever the situation it looks like a prop from the walking dead and seems to ache weirdly when I’m at my worst. Maybe a little girth loss below the glans but not enough that I can be certain. Hope that holds out at least.
[ ] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[X] Testicular Pain - some aches in the left one, lines up with some perineum “pain”. it’s not exactly pain, it’s like an unpleasant tingle.
[X] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness - they both shrank, then the right one got bigger, then shrank, now the right one is a good size but the left one is still a bit on the small side.
[X] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease - I had a bout of total numbness for a couple of hours which was scary as all hell but probably around 50% in the whole area now.
[ ] Weight Gain
[ ] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[X] Muscle Wastage - I’ve lost about five lbs of muscle mass and a bit of overall strength.
[ ] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[X] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes - I look a bit like skeletor.

Misc
[X] Prostate pain - I had weird fluttery spasms for the first few weeks which has tapered off to an odd uncomfortable tingling.
[X] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion - I feel alright when I first wake up, some days I feel alright until the evening. Some days I get hit by a truck about 2pm and can barely function.
[ ] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[ ] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[X] Increased hair loss - I’ve shed a tonne of hair but alarmingly the slick patches at my temples are starting to get fuzzy and new hairs are sprouting along the hairline. If you’d told me at seventeen I’d consider that a bad sign I wouldn’t believe it
[X] Frequent urination - This has gotten better to a degree. It’s acceptable I suppose.
[ ] Lowered body temperature - I’m not going to lie, I haven’t had the balls to check this yet.

[X] Other (please explain)
My skin is awful pretty much all over. I think it’s because of dryness but my hands look like they’ve aged thirty years in thirty days and it’s quite disturbing. I’m trying to dodge the mirror tbh but the skin around my eyes is pretty dire and my entire face is dry.

Insomnia has improved dramatically. My sleep is still light, piss poor and interrupted four or five times a night but i’m getting enough to function and maybe repair a little I hope.

I was planning a more comprehensive update to try and document the strange things going on with my mind and body but to be honest I’m totally burnt out right now and it’s a hell of a long story.

#7

I don’t even know where to begin with my story. It’s so long, I don’t really remember what my life was like without fin and I’m not even sure I was entirely out of puberty when I finished the drug. Oh well.

As mentioned I started fin at seventeen years old under the recommendation of a dermatologist. At the time, she informed me that a lot of her patients had success with the generic product as it was a lot, lot cheaper. I was told to buy the 5mg generic, split the pills into four as .25mg wouldn’t make much difference and not to worry about side effects, they only happened with 2% of men and would fade if I continued treatment or go entirely if I quit. I thought she was great! Propecia was/is really expensive. Now I realise she took away my ability to pursue legal action. Oh well.

In retrospect I noticed side effects within 1-2 months, however these side effects were not mentioned anywhere at the time so I didn’t worry about it to much. I always figured I was a bit weird, in fact I was kinda proud of it so I didn’t worry to much about the weird spacey moments I sometimes had. I felt like I wasn’t really in reality any more. I found out later this was probably the first manifestation of side effects and my first run in with brain fog. Certainly not my last though.

I remember having ball ache a few times and I checked the hairloss forums. Stupidly believed everything I read from the guys there such as “It’s totally normal for your balls to ache, mine did too for a while” “I don’t get morning wood either, don’t worry about it! Always works fine for me when I need it to”. At the time there was still very few people talking about persistent side effects and the ones who did looked positively insane and thus with my fears alleviated I got on with my life. Confident I’d be able to hang onto my hair until I was old enough for it to be acceptable for me to lose my hair naturally.

I say I got on with my life but I really didn’t. Over the next year or two I found myself slowly withdrawing from my friends, I’d never been an overly outgoing guy as it is so it didn’t really bother me even when my friends started affectionately referring to me as a Hermit.

I slowly lost my passion for life, my interests and eventually everything. I stopped caring and pursued visceral pleasures like women, drugs, gaming. Anything that’d give me that hit without any real investment. I avoided a woman I fell in love with the moment I met her for reasons I’ve never really been able to figure out and instead found myself with women who were a hell of a lot less respectable. I was diagnosed with depression but didn’t give enough of a fuck to bother with either the antidepressants or keep my meetings with the mental health places I was referred. It was a really fucked up time, I was never really happy, never satisfied. This went on until 2010. A few awful relationships, nothing achieved in life and I was still unhappy. I wondered if I were shallow or lacked what I took to really become a successful person, what was there to really succeed with? I didn’t care about anything anyway.

Eventually my life started slowly improving. I stopped obsessing over my hair and only really took my fin as and when I remembered. I missed 4-5 month long periods at a time time. I finally grew enough balls to commit to the woman I met all those years ago and things were really looking up for me. I still wasn’t happy. I still wasn’t successful. I put that down to still not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
I started taking fin again when I realised my hair was falling out again. I wasn’t about to let myself go bald when I was just getting my shit together. No way. Within a month or two of remembering to use it everyday that floaty, disconnected feeling came back. It wasn’t constant and again I didn’t link it to the drug. I found myself becoming unhappy again, using a lot of substances to make myself feel better and neglecting the long term wins that come with ambition Eventually visiting my Doctor again to try and figure this out… I was diagnosed with depression, given anti depressants and sent on my merry way. Fortunately I stopped taking them pretty quickly once again. I was still diligently taking my magic hair pills though!

In 2011 I noticed minor sexual side effects. My refractory period was longer than it really should have been for a 22 year old man and my erections were weaker the second time around, if there was a second time around in the day and a few times during sex I found I couldn’t tell how hard I was without checking with my hand. I chose to reduce my dose and try and live a healthier lifestyle, started lifting etc. I found very little improvement and came off of the drug entirely around that time. I didn’t notice any improvements within a few months and went back on.
I was very attentive my first few weeks and found no difference in anything so dismissed it as my imagination and carried on taking a much, much reduced dosage of the drug. 1/8th of a fincar pill every other day usually and carried on this way for while. I ran out of my fin around september 2013 and my source now required a prescription. I could get it from two or three well respected pharmacy/drugstores here who would happily issue a prescription without even seeing me but I chose to drop the drug as it would’ve cost me around five times as much to continue the treatment. It was way to expensive for me.

Suprisingly life got a little better over the next few months, I didn’t notice a marked improvement in my sexual sides but a very, very slow improvement that was so subtle I didn’t associate it with stopping the drug and more importantly my ambition slowly crept back, a feeling that was long lost to me and it was good, I started to finally tackle the problem that’d been troubling me my whole life and finally started formulating a plan to figure out what to do with my future.

My hairloss started creeping back nearly a year later and I started getting worried. I was considering going to college finally, my girl loved my hair and I had since decided she was the one for me. I bet you guys can tell where this is going by now. I actually had one 5mg pill left and decided I’d bite the bullet, get the stuff from boots when I got paid and deal with the situation. I split my 5mg pill into four, bit one of those quarter in half as I’d usually done, vowing to watch out for any sides.

I crashed three days later, six hours after I had ingested the second 1/8th of the pill with no warning whatsoever. I plan on filling in my experiences since then with a lot, lot more detail but right now I’ve burnt myself out again.

Thanks guys.

#8

It’s been six weeks since I’ve crashed and I’ve seen some improvements and some worsening. I’m going to list them here.

Improvements.

Sometimes waking with morning erections now. Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they’re pretty dire. I’m taking this as a good sign since the first two weeks I was almost entirely impotent.
My sleep has improved drastically. It’s still fucking awful but it’s better than it was. (two hours max of broken sleep in a ten hour period)
My body, facial hair and eyebrow hair appears to have stopped shedding.
Regained a tiny bit of libido.
Genital pain/prostate spasms has gradually declined. Is still present but more of an unpleasant tingle.

Worsening.

My face looks like hell, dark circles around my eyes right up the bridge of my nose and I think I’ve lost some fat along those sides as my eyes are wider apart and for want of a better word a prettier shape. Cheeks are a little sunken, jawline looks a little weaker and skin is thinner and dry all contributing to an overall decline in “healthy” appearance.
Zombie cock is still very much in full force when flaccid. Sometimes it looks normal size, sometimes larger (Wtf?) sometimes shrunken up like an eight year old. Weird spider veins very much present but seem to fade almost entirely when it cba to wake up.

The rest of my symptoms appear to be stable at the moment and both the good at the bad seems to go through cycles ie: a week of strong nocturnals followed by a week of worsening etc.

I’m currently putting together my own recovery protocol. It’s been done before and it takes a damn long time to do it but i’m not waiting around to find out if I recover naturally. I will force my body to be as healthy as possible and give it the conditions it needs to heal. Our sole purpose is to survive and reproduce. I’m twenty five and I truly believe my body is trying to repair itself. I also believe reproduction is secondary to survival. My body and mind are fucked up right now and my body will prioritize healing those over my reproductive system. This is just my belief and it keeps me going. It was Cdnuts belief too and I genuinely believe he was right, he struggled for so long with this condition and he isn’t the only person who recovered with that route. I’ll also be donating to the foundation as often as I can afford.
Be it two, five or even ten years to recovery, I’m prepared to ride this coaster to the end.

You only realise what you’ve got when it’s gone and I had so much.

Thanks guys.

#9

I don’t really understand propeciahelp nowadays. There doesn’t seem to be any positive people here at all, the ones who are get chased off or choose to stay away from the forum. I understand those people and I respect them. I understand the people who leave and occasionally come back here and there to update even more though, those few are the golden few here who made me realise there was no reason to throw myself under a train.

I hope this thread ends up being an inspiration for some people like the many threads and users who’ve been inspirational to me.

My symptoms haven’t really changed much in the past few days apart from one thing.

My perineum pain/spasms have ground to a halt. 48 hours now. My sexual function hasn’t worsened with that so my prostate hasn’t rotted away inside me. I was really worried that was what was happening, it was the most profound warm pain sensation. Somewhat how I’d imagine radiation to feel.

So I got that going for me.

#10

Any updates?