Hi guys,
I am 28, tall (187cm), skinny(63kg) and always was. I have little facial hair, but everything else is pretty normal - have chest hair, had acne and oily skin which still sort of exists and also balding slowly since the age of 18. I have a large varicocelle on the left testicle since the age of 14, but I never felt it affects me in any way. I started masturbating in such an early age which I can’t even recall and felt like having a great libido all my life. Until…
When I was 24 my hairloss started to freak me out and from that age to 26 I used fin (propecia); 1.25 mg per day for the first year, and about 0.5mg in the second. I didn’t feel like having ED/libido issues before the drug, while taking it and a few months after quitting. This statement is a bit tricky, because all of the symptoms I have at the moment seemed to occur slowly after quitting, and I can’t remember any “crash”, but I can honestly say that all this time I had sex life which I can easily describe as satisfying.
On day one of propecia use I felt like something is really wrong: I got brain fog and wasn’t able to concentrate and felt poisoned, but thought I just needed some time to “get used to it”. Through the first months I felt terrible testicular pain sometimes, but I had no bad experience in the sexual area, so I ignored it. Moreover, I felt hornier as time went by. It did nothing to my hair but my scalp became less oily, and my sex drive went up, so overall, it did not feel so bad.
Over this time on fin I became more and more anxious. Because of that, I decided at some point, one year approx after starting, to cut the dosage. It didn’t help and later on, I got a panic attack. It scared me because I felt very mentally stable until that point, so I quit the drug.
During a few months after stopping I had a lot of these panic attacks and felt awful. I started a therapy (CBT), and over time managed to reduce anxiety. But as the anxiety feeling tapered off, I felt less and less sexual. At some point, I felt completely asexual and impotent, lost sensation in my genitals, felt atrophy in my balls, no sexual thoughts, no morning wood. Complete, horrible sexual silence. It was 10 months approximately after quitting propecia, but I had (and still do) a strong feeling that my problem was related to this drug, although the vast majority of propecia users that experienced sexual sides report ED and libido loss through the usage, short recovery after quitting and crashing a few weeks later. In my case, I had a gradual decline after quitting, which, again, is not typical, but there similar reports to mine do exist.
I had no clue of what’s going on and all of this bloodwork they had on the site’s checklist was unfamiliar. I took these tests and got the following results (again - 10 months after quitting 2 years of usage, age~27):
LH: 4.5 (0.57-12.07)
FSH: 13.7 (0.95-11.95)
Total Testosterone: 14.17 (6-29)
Free Testosterone: 33.84 (31-142)
Estradiol: 54 (40-161)
Free T4: 15.47 (9-19)
Total T3: 1.6 (0.89-2.44)
TSH: 0.89 (0.35-4.94)
Prolactin: 515.5 (54-380)
Vitamin D: 28.6
With a TT of an 80 years old dude, FT of a corpse and a prolactin of a pregnant woman I went to several doctors, one of them is like a well known American genius professor (endo), which all mainly shouted words like “fine”, “in range” and “psychological”.
I couldn’t bare the fact that this is happening to me. I became obsessed. I forced myself to masturbate, watched a lot of porn, read a lot of forum threads in propeciahelp - and became even more frustrated and compulsive. I felt there’s no resort, no one that really recovered, no one that really got his libido back - even not with TRT or SERMs. The stress and depression got stronger.
Besides the crap, all of these professionals (doctors / therapist) said from time to time things that actually made some sense. Endo said that FSH shows infertility and that my varicocelle is the main cause for that, so maybe its also interrupts with sexuality. One of the other doctors said the prolactin sample shouldn’t be taken early in the morning like the other hormonal stuff.
Another one said that bloodwork is crap anyways and swore that especially calculating FT is a “complete mambo jambo” and I should take SHBG test instead. He also mentioned that the fact I’m skinny affects this result in a way I couldn’t understand. My therapist said that even if I have T problem, my compulsive masturbation probably led to dopamine related issues that cause ED and libido loss and asked me to abstain from masturbation, sex and porn for a certain time.
I didn’t abstain, but a month later, I took another bloodwork in the morning and a separate one for prolactin later through the day. I got the following results:
FSH: 17.5 mIU/mL (1.4-18.1)
LH: 10.14 mIU/mL (1.5-9.3)
Testosterone 24.37 nmol/L (8.4-28.7)
Free Testosterone: 51.49 pmol/L (31-142)
Cortisol: 392.0 nmol/L (138-690)
Dhea-SO4: 7.0 umol/L (2.17-15.2)
Androstenedione: 2.30 ng/mL (0.3-2.63)
TSH: 1.11 mIU/L (0.55-4.78)
Free T4: 12.89 pmol/L (11.5-22.7)
Prolactin: 203.1 mIU/L (45-375)
Progesterone: 3.99 nmol/L (0.89-3.88)
17 OH-Progesterone: 25.64 nmol/L (1.81-10.3)
I couldn’t have SHBG test and still looking for a way to perform this test in Israel, where I live, but I took a sperm test and found out that I won’t have any chance to get my girlfriend pregnant ever, not even in a million years.
So with all this new data, I got very confused. My total T was really good. My free T was still zombish, but the doctors swore this result is “not serious” and to try and get SHBG result instead.
My prolactin was normal, and the high progesterone didn’t impress any doctor as well.
From that point until now, a year went by. In this year I tried to work on my stress issues and failed to abstain masturbation like the therapist asked me. If I managed to abstain for a few days, one of the two scenarios occurred: in the good one, I felt sort of a slight sexual desire (not even close to what I was before, but some) and “used” it immediately to have sex or to masturbate; the bad one: I kept on feeling nothing, got really stressed… and jacked.
Today I still have zero libido through the day, nothing at all. My penis won’t even move the whole day and it feels cold and disconnected from my brain. My erections, if they do occur, don’t last over 5 sec of non-direct stimulation and are like 70% in strength. No morning erections, although, there are sometimes when there are partial ones.
The weird thing is, I find myself hard through the night, sometimes when I wake out of a dream. Sometimes, and it happened a few times before this year, I’m waking up through the night with real libido (!) and have great sex with my girlfriend, but going back to the same state in the morning. This whole year I a can recall only one time I felt libido through daytime.
I decided to have another bloodwork soon. After whole this long story which I hope you read, I wanted to ask you for your opinion - based on my bloodwork and my story - what should be the best course of action for me? Where is the problem in your opinion? Is there a real mental factor in my case or some of the bloodwork and one year of 99% asexuality proves otherwise?
The most frustrating thing is that I DON’T KNOW where the real problem is, and how to treat it.
Say I get similar results in my next bloodwork, what would be the best course of action? I thought about having a varicocelectomy; endo recommends, urologists don’t, saying it has nothing to do with T and if it had, my left testicle would be much smaller, and as for fertility, well it’s probably lost anyway.
SERMs? After reading some data here and across the web, it seems like it might raise SHBG, and if FT is my problem it’ll probably be useless. TRT scares me… so little of success story with libido… I’d go for it, as a last resort, but I have to make sure that this is what I really need (?)
I’m a very light smoker and a very light drinker. I eat and sleep well. I have supplemented vitamin D, zinc and omega3 this past year with no success. At this point I’m supplementing vitamin D only.
Please help.
Many thanks.