The End of Hope for Natural Testosterone Production & The Beginning of Lifelong TRT

Between the Testim yesterday and today, and the HCG I’ve been taking – I feel great. I’m not back to “normal” yet, but I’m getting there and it’s not just placebo. I’ll probably have to switch to Androgel if I want my insurance to cover it, but there isn’t much of a difference, other than smell and stickyness.

A long hard road.It has been a long, hard, six-month road of trying to get my natural testosterone production back up. I’ve tried several alternative treatments for low-T, including – for six months – only natural things like zinc, magnesium, tribulus and deadlifts at the gym. I didn’t want to go on life-long TRT at my age, so my hope (once it was clear that my secondary hypogonadism was here to stay, and that I wasn’t going to produce enough LH and FSH to make adequate testosterone) was that I could take Menopur or HCG instead of testosterone. That way at least my testes would stay “normal” and I’d be treating the problem at its source, rather than the symptom down below. But, alas, the US medical system wore me down. I just couldn’t live like that anymore. I was depressed, losing more weight every month (185, 182, 179, 175, 170, 169… how low can I go?); was losing motivation and memory by the day; and generally just felt like CRAP.

The doctor still won’t prescribe me injectable testosterone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give those idiots $40 twice a month to stick a needle in my ass. So I’ll continue to get my Testim or Androgel so I can stock-pile it away (because I’m paranoid about not having access to testosterone at some point in my life now that I’ll be on it forever and life is miserable without it) and will instead be ordering injectable testosterone online from a compounding pharmacy somewhere. I’ll be sure to use up the gel stuff before it expires, but they generally last 2-3 years unopened under the right storage conditions. And that’s just the labels expiration date. They probably last a lot longer than that.

LONG STORY SHORT FOLKS…

I’m back on TRT. For good this time… unless something better comes along that is affordable (unlike menopur) and works without shutting down my testes directly (testosterone), or downregulating / desensitizing the leydig cells in the testes indirectly (HCG).

I feel good. I’m sure in six months I’ll be back to feeling like I wish I didn’t have to take this damn shot, or rub this damn gel in all the time – but right now I feel good. I’m looking forward to getting my life back. If you want to follow along the journey of a young man (33 now, 30 when I was first diagnosed, 31 when I started TRT, 32 when I tried to come off it and use alternatives) who has to take testosterone for the rest of his life – stick around. This blog is going to be up a looooooooooong time – providing, of course, that I don’t get prostate cancer at an early age and die. If I do I’ll try and let you know.

😉