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 canāt even imagine what that would be like. Sorry to hear that.
When I crashed it turned white/grey a bit. Itās a little darker now but probably because itās so shrunken. 
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I donāt know how I forgot to add āscrotum rapidly ascending and descendingā 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 Iāve ever had. It happened when I went to the bathroom after taking a urine test. Canāt make this stuff up.
Iām very low. Putting all the pieces together, Iāve 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. Itās 10x as bad. Iām 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. Itās 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 couldnāt 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. Iām very sorry youāre going through this but sadly grateful others have similar experiences and Iām 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 youād be okay with that
(Back to shameless symptom dumping) I am now certain that my tendons have foreshortened all over my body. Itās something to do with the messed up lipid metabolism/mild lipodystrophy. Like a generalized set of mild contractures. Iām 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. Itās 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
āTGF-Ī² is critical to the modulation of tendon healing and the effects of its isoforms are quite distinct. In flexor tendons, TGF-Ī²1 expression is auto-inductive and is initially produced by inflammatory cellsā
Iāve 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 havenāt 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 arenāt 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 couldnāt bring myself to explain everything, just said I felt Iād like I had a heart attack or something. They didnāt 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 couldnāt 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. Iām not sure what it was or how to describe it. Things simultaneously looked HD and like each āframeā 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 āPFS attackā 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 donāt know if itās 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 āhallucinatingā/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. Iām 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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Iām not really advancing in any logical or chronological order with my posts in this thread, but Iād 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 menās 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.
Whatās 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
Iām 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 itās 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, Iām 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 Iām not sure, looking back, if it was before or after this crash. I didnāt see any connection at the time, so I wouldnāt 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 āpubertyā 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 Lionās Mane (a few times) during this recovery period. The lionās 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 Dāor 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 2023ā¦
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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Chen, Iām glad you were able to relate. Feel free to message sometime if youād like.
My symptoms, unfortunately, seem stable. One big thing bothering me is that my legs, feet and hands feel so fucked up. Iām afraid there isnāt much I can do for those. Feels like they are being damaged with use due to the lack of padding, collagen, tightness of tendons or whatever the fuck is going on.
And, of course, the severe brain fog. If that were to ease up I could so much more easily pick up the pieces and cope with my messed up body.
I suppose I should also report that I am mostly capable of erections and masturbation. The drive to have sex is virtually non existent. My semen is so unnaturally thick and my ejaculation is so forceless, however, that itās painful and unpleasant to orgasm.
Friends, I cannot get over the fact that I was intimately familiar with these kind of symptoms, knew that pfs was a thing, probably literally HAD it from other things and still risked it all for my goddamn hair. Itās like a fucking biblical allegory against vanity.
My āemotionsā are back and itās just a pit in my stomach repeatedly mulling that over. Iām just trying to cope and tell myself that a gut reaction to emotion at all is a good sign for my microbiome health lol.
I havenāt been back to work and I donāt know if Iām deluding myself by thinking I can get back to a position capable of doing that job. I canāt get on disability for now because there is no fucking diagnosis for this. Thank god my poor, sweet girlfriend is going to work to keep us afloat right now.
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Hang in, brother.
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A touch of good news, my urologist believes in permanent fin side effects and referred me to a sex medicine specialist. Might be able to try legit hcg at least.
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Howās it going fella, any change, improvements 
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Thanks for checking in. Very slight improvements over the past 6 months. still swimming in the fog of anhedonia, derealization, cognitive slowing, fatigue, terrible sleep quality, etc.
Iām back to my pre-fin weight but still have the weird soft tissue loss in hands, feet and legs. skin is rubbery, sensitive and thin. Legs feel weak and knees feel terrible.
Orgasm is often followed by a rush of painful pins and needles in the glans. The glorified urologist I was referred to was no help, just prescribed viagra which I havenāt even bothered to pick up.
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So pleased thereās at least some positives, good signs I hope.
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I have the exact same pain in my dick and the same tissue changesā¦were you able to get a hold of HCG with your doc?
Wow another SP and kratom user, maybe it did after all play a role in my case but I didnāt notice until SP became a factor where things actually went south. I also got the weight loss and muscle wasting but that somewhat bounced back though I still canāt really gain weight no matter what. Didnāt get any joint changes or stiffening/shortening. My digestive system is very easy to disturb. I usually hang around 130-132 pounds myself, if I eat a lot more I might be able to hit 134 but thatās been the peak of it for years now. I canāt handle eating land meat because it makes me sick and I canāt have seafood all the time either. Iām left limited and vegan often by force. My guts are just a trainwreck and I donāt know how to solve it. I never had the heart issues with my PFS attacks though. My PFS attacks like you had contained the nerve burning, crawling sensations through my nervous system, strange vision, and feeling faint. At my worst cognitively I had complete loss of my mental visual abilities to and a lack of cognitive power to map out complex things. That has largely recovered though but it was one of the latest oneās to start working at a baseline again. I didnāt expect to find a subset of people with nearly identical combinations of things that specifically caused all of this here but there has to be a way out of this and we canāt give up until we get it. If there is this many similarities with cases with elements this similar a cure to it canāt be far away.