Ps as I stated I’m still.bad but no where near when SB crashed me and how bad my crash was 7 months ago
Everyone is different Given time you might even bounce back
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Well. I guess I’m living proof that even a severe onset case of PFS won’t kill you. Without going into detail too much, it probably came closer than you’d think. I lost 15 pounds in a few days as an already very skinny guy. My heart kept going arrhythmic and I had a couple INSANE neurological episodes. Some of which was honestly suicidally induced. As in my body was so weak at the peak of the wasting that I was able to induce near death experiences by just attempting exercising. The last one landed me in the psych ward.
My whole body is damaged. It’s as if my tendons are all short and calcified or something. It’s become painful in my wrists, back and legs.
I have zero ability to think critically, or abstractly. I can hardly follow a conversation. My mucus membranes and skin are still so dry.
Basically, add in all the symptoms I didn’t check in my post and then a dozen or so more.
My goal in life is now to recover even 20% from where I am and dedicate myself to stopping this.
CBD oil and aspirin together help the pain, if anyone else is even having that symptom.
Among all these symptoms, did you have muscle loss? my entire body is atrophying and I have pain, as if I have developed symptoms similar to autoimmune patients, as the symptoms fluctuate… have you had muscle loss? I saw that you mentioned weight loss, even though you are already very thin, can you tell if you lost muscle or fat?
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I lost both. Heavily, and in ways I didn’t even know were possible. My bones were under a paper thin layer of skin in several spots. My appetite surged since then and I rapidly regained a layer of visceral adipose (read: unhealthy) fat. So rapidly that my bracelet had to be cut off at the psych ward on the second day because it was turning my hand red/numb. The body composition changes have been a cartoonish hell.
Here is what my stomach looked like less than a week into the crash
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The fat loss and the oily urine & stool are 100% interdependent. I peed out all my brown and beige fat pads throughout my body. I don’t think you can replace those, at least not as they were. Same with all the lifelong genetic muscle I’ve lost.
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You took less than 1 mg over the course of four days and are now suffering with these insane, life altering symptoms. This madness needs to stop.
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Thank you. I certainly agree, something needs done about this.
Anyone else lose ability to comprehend complex patterns and visualize/map things out in the head?
This is one of the most distressing symptoms of brain fog. As an artist and musician, this combined with loss of dexterity is driving me insane. I can’t even use my coping mechanisms without being reminded that I am being hindered
I’m going to update this thread bit by bit with more detail on each “set” of symptoms as best I can.
Here is my hand at rest. I believe it to be something like Dupuytren’s contracture. I did have existing ulnar nerve issues but not like this. My palm and thumb are set differently than how they were pre-fin.
Notice the crookedness of the thumbnail and wrinkle lines on the joint. Not outside of the realm of what someone’s thumb might look like, but that’s not what my thumb looks like. There are strange changes like that all over my body now. I can’t tell if it is a connective tendon issue, a joint issue, from the loss of fat and muscle, or all of the above.
Another example, my toes look longer and bonier, and my toenails look dark due to atrophy of fat pads. My pinky toe is usually an inch long fat little nub. Obviously I don’t go carrying a before picture of these things. You can also see where my cuticles rapidly receded on the toenails, where it looks like they have two different sections/colors to them or bits of dead skin on the nail. (Excuse the long ungroomed toenails lol)
And finally (for this comment) my knees are suddenly slightly knock-kneed/crooked. I am also experiencing sudden changes consistent with those of rolled shoulders, scoliosis and anterior pelvic tilt. I don’t know how useful pictures would be for those. This cascade of changes has made my legs, back, neck and wrists painful.
Speaking of cuticle recession, here is a fun one I was able to document:
At the peak of the wasting, I noticed these maroon red crusts on the base of both thumbnails. They flaked off like they were just dirt or something, but given that my cuticles have receded downward, I am pretty sure they were dried capillaries or blood. Sounds batshit insane and impossible, I know.
Penile changes:
I have photographic evidence of some of this but obviously I will spare them here, and again you don’t go carrying a “before pic” of your flaccid penis. I was also already dealing with lowering libido, mild darkening, wrinkling and venous leak before the recent crash.
On Fin:
First change was mild numbness.
Then a couple pains in the scrotum and changes in urinary flow.
Immediately upon stopping, in chronological order.
Constricted, bumpy erections, followed by a normal erection only a few hours later.
Nerve pain in the penis and scrotum. Pain in the prostate. Coldness in the penis. Severe numbness. Hard flaccid. Scrotum moving up and down rapidly. Dark brown, SUPER wrinkly appearance that lasted less than a day. A brief return to looking mostly normal but with looser skin. Back to hard flaccid.
I had an episode of SEVERE nerve pain in the entire genitourinary/glute area, coupled with extreme intensification of brain fog while I was taking Bactrim (sulfamethoxazole) on the urologist’s orders a week or two in.
Since then it has had more “long flaccid” symptoms/appearance and new prominent veins running down the shaft. The pain has mostly subsided (finally, a month in) and in its wake is an excruciating numbness. The glans is somewhat inflated while flaccid in a way I’ve never noted before. Almost as if it is shaped differently.
Same here man. Wrinkly, loose skin, prominent veins, severe numbness, different shape.
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Did you happen to notice the temporary brown-ness? I had brown sweat all over that day. I was going to list that symptom next actually.
Chromhidrosis. I sweat a thick goop instead of sweat, and when I wiped it off it was a brown color.
Nah, no brown sweat or anything. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Sorry to hear that.
When I crashed it turned white/grey a bit. It’s a little darker now but probably because it’s so shrunken. 
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I don’t know how I forgot to add “scrotum rapidly ascending and descending” to the penile changes/symptoms list. I have video proof I plan on showing my urologist.
Oh and a large amount of semen in my urine on one occasion. Like, bigger than any load I’ve ever had. It happened when I went to the bathroom after taking a urine test. Can’t make this stuff up.
I’m very low. Putting all the pieces together, I’ve had this disease at a lower level for a long time, two previous crashes. I was already fighting tooth and nail to get back to myself from my 2020 crash, all the while using increasing amounts of antiandrogenic hair topicals. Now, the finasteride crash. It’s 10x as bad. I’m so sick, stupid and weak right now. I feel that the best I can hope for is recovering to 25% of who I was supposed to be before all this. It’s rough.
The only things keeping me going are hope that I can help others with this disease and guilt over what my absence would do to my girlfriend, friends and family.
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Hang in, brother. I was a husband and dad of 3, and I was in the exact same boat. Took accutane (while drinking quite a bit on weekends in law school). Suddenly couldn’t start/complete urinating, insomnia, joint pain, hair loss, waking up at night 3/4 times to urinate, disinterested in sports/reading/music. I just figured it was the drinking (as I had never really done so). Weed became legalized, and when I took it at night, it made all those problems vanish (except the start/complete issue). Suddenly the weed stopped working - I felt nothing. Instead of common sense kicking in, I started mixing alcohol. I got crushed in so many ways I see in your posts. I get it. I understand.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Life is hell. But every day you keep from jumping off that bridge (metaphorically and literally) is a gift you can still give to the ppl in your life.
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Thank you, friend. I’m very sorry you’re going through this but sadly grateful others have similar experiences and I’m not totally crazy here. I am a recovered alcoholic of 5 years+. I would relapse, but it probably would have no effect anyway lol. We could message about all of it if you’d be okay with that
(Back to shameless symptom dumping) I am now certain that my tendons have foreshortened all over my body. It’s something to do with the messed up lipid metabolism/mild lipodystrophy. Like a generalized set of mild contractures. I’m quite certain that means some small amount of tissue has died in various places.
Lips, ears, nose cartilage, oral frenulums, tendons in arms, hands, feet, back and legs have all shortened/tightened. I wonder if hardcore stretching will do anything for this. It’s almost more of a floxie symptom than a typical pfs symptom, but I feel this happens to many pfs guys at some rate/degree based on their symptoms and the fact that TGFb seems to be affected
“TGF-β is critical to the modulation of tendon healing and the effects of its isoforms are quite distinct. In flexor tendons, TGF-β1 expression is auto-inductive and is initially produced by inflammatory cells”
I’ve really been meaning to add more detailed posts about my symptoms and updates here, but I barely have the executive function and focus to do so.
Even here I haven’t gone into full detail about the extent of the horror and suicidal depravity of my crash. Some of it sounds so unbelievable. Even on this board I am worried about sounding like a hypochondriac.
Basically, I believe I was very near death at the peak of it. I think I had already started losing weight on alfatradiol the couple months prior and/or on fin the week before the crash. I was around 146 pounds at the start which is already pretty slim for me. Then, in one week at the onset of the crash I dropped to fucking 130. Again, in a week. It was all seemingly muscle and long term fat reserves. It was in places you aren’t supposed to lose either, like the hands, feet, neck, etc. And of course, the most sleep I could get each night was an hour of restless shutdown. Below I will detail the cardiovascular symptoms and resultant ER trips I had in the midst of the million other symptoms I developed during the crash.
About a week and a half in, I was so weak and my heartbeat was erratically alternating between racing and mild bradycardia. I was so weak, and so suicidal, that I successfully triggered some sort of cardiac event by just moving around quickly while doing a couple household chores.
My heart began beating in a completely illogical rhythm, no consistent beat. I laid down and let it happen, thinking it would just kill me. My left arm felt cold. Eventually, to my dismay at the time, it went away.
Later that night I had symptoms of blood clots moving through my body. Most notably, one of my big toes turned pink and inflamed, and was twitching on its own. This was preceded and followed by sensations of something moving or crawling up and down that leg.
Eventually, I went to the ER. I couldn’t bring myself to explain everything, just said I felt I’d like I had a heart attack or something. They didn’t find much of anything.
The next day, I did a pull up or two. I started having severe bradycardia, head pressure and lightheadedness. Once again, I laid down hoping my heart would just stop or something. Again, I had strange symptoms. This time it was like a stroke. I felt super out of it, even for pfs crash standards. I was lying down and my arm felt numb and dead. I tried moving my gum to the other side of my mouth and couldn’t feel it. Again, I laid there hoping to just die. Eventually, guilt consumed me and I told my gf what was going on and we rushed off to go back to the ER. Nothing noted.
The next day I woke up with what looked like an indented blood vessel on my face under the eye, it remained for about two hours. Idk but it was strange.
The final and most interesting/horrifying of these episodes: A day or two later (its all a bit of a blur) about a week and a half to two weeks into my crash, I slammed my body down onto the bed. Something that normally would not affect anyone.
Keep in mind, at this stage of my crash I had virtually no subcutaneous fat or cushioning anywhere on my body, the skin on my head felt like a loose paper wrapping on my skull and the lightest tap to the head felt like a concussion inducing blow. Bumping into something minor while walking would throw off my entire balance and hurt at the point of contact.
Anyway, my vision started fucking strobing. I’m not sure what it was or how to describe it. Things simultaneously looked HD and like each “frame” of my vision was interspersed with a frame of pure black. My heart started racing and fluttering. Yet again, I laid there hoping whatever was happening would end this nightmare. And, yet again, I eventually felt guilt over this and got up and told my gf that I was having some sort of medical event and had been letting it happen. This time, my mother was in town and came over. They both agreed that I should go to the ER and get some help, understandably thinking this was just some sort of panic attack.
On the ride there, I had what I can only describe as a “PFS attack” where the symptoms got excruciatingly bad. My penis had been experiencing nerve pain through the entire crash up until this point, but it ratcheted up to 11/10 and engulfed my entire pelvic/glutes area. I had a similar nerve pain all over my head, especially the forehead and nose. My brain fog became so bad I could not understand what was happening.
The ER was getting tired of my shit at this point. They had me and my mother sit in a runoff waiting room. During this time my brain fog was so intense I could not respond when my mom asked me anything, and the head pressure was intense.
They called me back to get bloodwork. I don’t know if it’s related or not, but the head discomfort and brain fog shot up even more directly afterwards. I spoke like a robot or stroke victim, very slowly and unsure of each word. Unable to form sentences longer than a couple words. My head felt like it was on fire, and totally hollow at the same time.
A hospital staffer called me back shortly after to ask some insurance questions and actually ended up sending me to the fast-track based on how I was talking and looking. I began “hallucinating”/involuntarily visualizing very simple shapes such triangles or circles in sets of three. Even at the fast track, all that occurred was they conferred with my mother and decided to begin the necessary process to send me to a psych ward.
It was the strangest, most harrowing experience of my life. Afterwards, I was sent to the regular waiting room where I waited all night for a room and finally passed out for 4 or 5 hours lying on a waiting room chair. The most extreme symptoms I just described had subsided, but everything looked hazy and my mind was still very slow and simple, again even for mid-crash pfs standards. In the morning I was given a room where I waited all day until I was finally transported to the psych ward that night. I laid around in this hospital bed, emaciated as all hell feeling like I had a stroke, with no way to explain what was going on and no hope of treatment or understanding.
I will continue to expand upon my story here, but this is all I have in me right now. I’m not sure what the hell that last experience was. All I know is that something in my body went horribly, horribly wrong and experiencing it in a hospital where they are largely ignoring you as a hypochondriac was a level of torture I hope no one ever experiences.
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I’m not really advancing in any logical or chronological order with my posts in this thread, but I’d like to go into more detail here about my two prior crashes and why I suspect that I have actually been dealing with PFS for half of my life.
I was always a very bright, if socially eccentric, child. When I entered adolescence, I had a pretty significant phase of curious experimentation with substances. I had the mischievous habits of browsing erowid and raiding medicine cabinets looking for anything of interest.
This information is really only necessary to explain why it is that, when the bottle of men’s multivitamins I was then sharing with my dad stated that it contained an herbal extract of something called Saw Palmetto, I read and took note of it.
One night, during the summer before my 15th birthday, I was hanging out with friends and experimenting with adderal and alcohol. Consequently, I was up all night and exhausted when the morning came. These friends and I walked down to the local store and I, for some reason, picked up two energy drinks. I had never even had one before.
As you might expect, I had a devastating panic attack. Eventually, I went back home and was subsequently found out about the drinking and everything and grounded.
What’s curious is that, from then on, the state of panic lingered for months, accompanied by a self-perceived loss of intelligence, loss of creative thinking, drop in libido and severe derealization/depersonalization. Music sounded less musical, it was hard to follow basic conversation or plot lines in media, etc. I thought somehow one night of binging and one morning of too much caffeine had caused me permanent brain damage.
All the while, I had been largely avoiding substances, eating as clean as a teenage boy can, and taking the saw palmetto multivitamin mentioned above
I’m not sure when I stopped taking it, but due to the panic and depression I was eventually put on a low dose of prozac the next summer (iirc). I remained on that for about a year or less.
The details and memories are hazy, but I know that somewhere in between this original crash and the prozac period, I began to experience coldness and numbness in the penis, ED, increased derealization and mild frontal hair loss. All of this, at the age of 15. Some other symptoms such as anxiety and cognitive impairment did ease up around the same time.
As you may guess, I now believe, in retrospect, that some form of PFS (and possible PSSD) was involved. Eventually things more or less stabilized and improved drastically with virtually all of these symptoms.
Depression is a thing in my family, so it’s hard to say if my waxing and waning battles with depression moving forward had anything to do with any of this. I did go on to become a self-medicating alcoholic in college, however. When I eventually quit a couple years after graduation, I had some of the best times of my life emotionally, creatively, cognitively, sexually, and mood wise.
Alas, I then went on to become increasingly addicted to kratom around
2017. There are many murmurs of endocrine/androgen disruption in the communities surrounding kratom. It also accelerates hair loss. All the parameters mentioned in the paragraph above began to dwindle over time.
Fast forward to the summer of 2020, I experienced another crash one day. This time it was more extreme. That unforgettable feeling of the sudden loss of intellect and creative/abstract thinking set in, immediately. The day before, I had been working on composing fairly complex music. This day, any basic music I heard just sounded like total nonsense noise to me.
My vision became blurry, it was hard to read or comprehend anything, and I experienced peripheral neuropathy type symptoms and weakness in my extremities. I also had total impotence and loss of libido.
I had no idea what had happened. Honestly, I’m still not sure what caused this crash, but I had various environmental exposures to probable endocrine disruptors around this time. I had also bought an OTC hair loss topical somewhere in that year but I’m not sure, looking back, if it was before or after this crash. I didn’t see any connection at the time, so I wouldn’t have noted it. When I say it happened in 2020, most people jump to covid but I had covid twice after this and it felt nothing like this.
I lost weight rapidly in the month after this sudden crash, and felt super weak. Eventually, through exercise and diet, many of the physical and sexual symptoms went away over the next few months. I eventually went through this weird “puberty” where I had increased acne, muscle gaining ability, sex drive and hair loss from about 6-12 months after the crash.
My fine motor dexterity has never felt exactly the same, but it improved greatly from where it was during the crash. My cognitive, creative and emotional blunting never fully recovered from this crash. Notably, I took both SSRIs (again) and Lion’s Mane (a few times) during this recovery period. The lion’s mane made me feel improved cognition but also extreme anxiety each time I took it. I also used BPC-157 and TB500 for a while which I credit with helping the physical/neuropathy symptoms.
Understandably, I still had made no connection to anti-androgenic hair loss substances. In the following years I used ketoconazole shampoo and Pura D’or conditioner (has a million hair loss herbals in it including saw palmetto) pretty religiously.
Then, in 2023, I became more dissatisfied with my hair loss. After much browsing forums, I had been avoiding fin. I finally decided to try oral castor oil and alfatradiol. This went on for a couple months at most, before I started subscribing to the Kevin Mann school of thought, got impatient with all these weaker products, and ordered some fin from alldaychemist in September of 2023…
Here I am. Even if I recover again, my life will never be the same after finasteride and piecing all of this together. I will continue at a later point, but for now I am again exhausted. Thank you to anyone who reads this.
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Your story resonates with me deeply, before coming to this forum I had never found anything negative about Tribulus on the internet, I have been suffering from some weird health issues since I was 15, even though I I live a healthy lifestyle, but I have irregular hair loss, acne, High uric acid,and unexplained fatigue and anxiety after defecation. I always thought I had low testosterone. I have been fighting these problems for seven years and have taken many Chinese medicines and probiotics. Bacteria and the like, it basically has no effect. As time goes by, I think it will reach 100% this year. Then I took accutane and finasteride for acne and hair loss respectively. Here we go
When I pieced this all together, I was shocked that I initially had a series of androgen issues from Tribulus that ultimately led me to accutane and finasteride
After my second meltdown yesterday, when I realized this was not going to be a short-term fix, I shed tears for the first time with this disease during a phone call with my parents.15 to 22, with peers I have gone through so much, but of course I will not succumb to this disease. I will do everything I can to fight it while my consciousness is still clear.
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