High Estradiol, Dr Gave Me Anastrazole. Thoughts?

That’s a sign hormones are too high or it could be the peaks and valleys (dosage) is too large. I feel as you describe when levels are too high.

I still am dumbfounded why your doctor didn’t just ask you to decrease your dosage, you have room to lower your dosage.

Danny is going to flip when he sees the AI dosage your doctor prescribed considering your estrogen was barely elevated. It’s like grabbing a bazooka to kill a fly on the wall.

Who’s Danny?

@dbossa

I just went through the same exact experience 3 months ago. Only difference is my Dr prescribed .25 mg anastrozole every day. If you respond like I did you will be miserable after a week or so. All your bones/joints will start hurting and it will feel like you have been run over by a truck. Thankfully I read enough threads on this forum which prompted me to have estradiol checked way before my next scheduled lab work. As suspected my estradiol was down to 7. When I called my Dr with the news he lowered my dose to .05. After 3 or 4 days at the lowered dose I started feeling much better. My goal is to totally eliminate it and my advice to you would be the same if possible.

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yes, i missed that reading your original post. I thought you were just lowering the dose. If you believe that estrogen is the cause of your symptoms, then the best course would be to modulate your T dose only. Why did you raise your dose if high E2 was a concern?

1mg of Arimidex a day.

I’d love to know who your doctor is. You can send me an anonymous email and I’d call him… For real. What he is doing is borderline criminal.

Your estrogen level is not an issue at all. What IS a glaring issue in my eyes is your free T is basically 13 ng/dL which is pathetically low.

You’re also injecting every 4-5 days but measured the day following the injection which will show you higher levels than what you will experience at your trough. Had you measured the day of your injection (prior to injection), your T levels would have been the tank.

You have a testosterone deficiency.

Whatever you are taking a week, DOUBLE IT, and don’t touch the damn AI.

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Interesting, thanks for you input Dan (Danny, Daniel?). After some research you seem to be somewhat of a celebrity on the topic, so I appreciate your response… but am a little confused as a lot of people on here have suggested lowering my dose and you suggest doubling it. Lots to take in. I did not take the AI at all.
I feel ok 2 days a week (the day after injection) and completely lousy the rest of the week. This morning I did my typical cardio and only made it half way through, couldn’t control my heart rate and thought I was going to pass out. I just now walked up one flight of stairs to my office and the same thing happened, had to sit down and relax for 5 minutes before I calmed down. I’m also racked with anxiety, feels like my heart is in my throat half the time. If you read my post you’ll see I went through a weird crash of sorts about two and a half weeks ago… my right leg went numb while riding a chair lift, that happens but it usually goes away after a few minutes, but this time it lasted until 9 that evening and my whole body felt super weird and floaty. As soon as it went away my legs felt very flush, I had veins popping out all over them, especially my calfs, and I’m not a veiny guy. It happened again on Tuesday evening but lasted almost 24 hours. I was better Wednesday and tried a light leg work out but my legs cramped super bad, all my muscles were cramping for about 9 days, I’ve never experienced that before in my life, my abs even cramped when I would turn my body to buckle my seat belt. The cramping went away and I can lightly lift again but was racked with anxiety that week and still have it fairly bad on and off. Last night my arms went numb in the middle of the night, I was on my back.
The week prior to this crash I was sort of elated all the time, everything seemed to make me really happy and I was literally getting tears of joy in my eyes from not overly exciting things, and I was getting really hard erections super easy and would have semen dripping out the top when they would start… that was new.
A little history:
I started TRT (for the first time every) May 1 injecting 60mg every 3 days (avg 140 a week). It was great, I felt great. I had pretty bad hair loss on my head from the start but I had an extra spring in my step, a smile on my face, could easily hold confident conversations with clients and it paid big time, and my sex drive was the best it had ever been… better than when I was a teenager and I’m 43.
Went back to my Dr after 2 months at the end of June for my first blood work since starting and my testosterone was close to 1300, which I now know isn’t the exact level he should have been considering. He told me I was taking to much and said to start injecting 100mg every 7 days and to come back in 2 months to test again. So July 1 I started that but didn’t like it, to much of a high right away followed by a low… then exactly three week later, July 21, I woke up in the middle of the night with piercing ear ringing, the whole world was spinning, I couldn’t walk down the hall to go to the bathroom, scared the crap out of me. It was gone the next morning but came back 2 days later, not as bad, but stayed for a week and was pretty bad until mid September. Right away I started retaining water, my libido was zero I didn’t get an erection for 3 weeks and my penis was the smallest I had ever seen it, I was racked with anxiety and my chest shoulders and back became covered in huge painful zits, and I looked like crap my eyes were empty and my face was bloated etc. I also lost interest in pretty much everything… I didn’t want to have fun with my kids, I live in one of the most beautiful areas of the planet and had no desire to mountain bike or get prepared for ski season, I forced myself to do my regular cario/weight routines in order to stay in shape but did not get the joy from it I typically do and the rest of the time I would just sit on the couch but couldn’t even find anything exciting to watch on tv, I also completely lost interest in reading. It was one of the worst experiences of my life and I’m fairly certain now that switching from injecting every 3 days to every 7 days totally fucked me up. So in early September I switched to 50mg every 4 days. I was somewhat better after a few weeks but did a 2 month ski conditioning class from late October to Christmas and struggled really bad in it, when I have totally excelled in the same class the last two years.
*I don’t think I can double my injection amount since I didn’t handle 100mg at once very well but starting next week I am going back to 60 mg every 3 days (i would do 20 a day but that’s a lotta needles plus I travel some so would get annoying packing needles around). I’m also going to try and get on with Defy Medical or someone similar, but if I’m not leveled back out and happy again after 2 months I’m going to figure out a way to safely stop trt all together, this roller coaster I have been on since August is no way to live a life at all.
I’m sure you reading this and saying Oh my god guy, shut the fuck up already. But I gotta get it all out there (and one side effect I’ve noticed of trt is my over explaining everything/being chatty).
It would be great if you respond with thoughts/nice advice but I totally understand if you won’t.

Of course they told you to lower the dose. That’s what they tell everyone to do. They would be incorrect.

What happens when you take an AI? Less testosterone converts into estrogen which means that you wind up with MORE testosterone.

When you stop taking an AI, MORE testosterone converts into estrogen which means that you wind up with LESS testosterone.

What this means is that, sometimes, it is wise to slightly increase your dose of testosterone to compensate. What guys often do is that they are so scared of estrogen, out of sheer ignorance, that they wind up LOWERING their testosterone dose to ‘prevent aromatization’.

This is bro science at its best. As soon as you concern yourself only with optimizing androgen levels you’ll be on the path to being symptom free. To all those that focus on E2, they will be visiting these forums for years to come looking for that magic bullet to fix their problems.

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I do believe you may do best on more frequent injections. Get a carrying case for needles. It’s no big deal. Start low and slow, a small amount each day or every other day. Once you feel comfortable with that you can increase the dose after a few weeks and try that out for awhile. If you find a dose that starts to give you anxiety or other side effects back off the dose for a bit and find where you feel best. Each change to your protocol can take 6-8 weeks until you achieve the full effect.

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