Tag: Testosterone

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Biohacking Media

Day 1766 and Thursday Styles Theory Strikes Again: Testosterone for Women Edition

One of my long standing theories, and a personal coinages, is the Thursday Styles Problem. It’s a theory of knowing directionally what is coming, but never being quite sure of when.

The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. If you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. If you know “what everyone knows everyone knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made.

Predicting the trends sounds easy when I put it this way, but the timing of it requires quite a bit of foresight, and considerable planning.

The trend piece is researched and reported over months. It requires the editor to be familiar enough with the trend to approve the writer taking time & resources. That means other upstream media has to have covered the topic in the niche which requires its own planning and coverage.

And while hype cycles have shortened, culture still takes time. And really important cultural trends may even require years to be relevant enough to be Thursday Styles worthy.

And can you afford to wait for the cycle to run? Breaking news happens and a piece gets pushed. A hotter trend might push the piece for weeks or months. If your business can’t survive the long game of becoming a Thursday Styles trend, being first hardly matters. Being right doesn’t matter as much as being right on time.

There is an art to this. Publicists play long games. They seed articles with a long arc in mind. Prediction markets place bets on the likelihood of something occurring, but with many actors you can’t really control when and how a thing happens.

It’s hard enough that Alex Danco believes it to be its own cultural movement and a force akin to past movements like modernism. Predicting the future is now an active part of living in the present for everyone.

So naturally when something I am doing happens within a month or so of me doing a thing, I tend to feel smug. When Albania was on the front page of the styles section while Alex and I were vacationing there, I gloated. I’d been hip to the forgotten European country for years.

Today I got a push notification about women taking testosterone. It had the full ugly animations of a thirty minute reporting on a full blown phenomenon.

Frustratingly it is very light on specifics as to what constitutes a “high dose”, while framing the piece almost entirely around the wonders women experience from taking a higher dose of testosterone than what might be considered average. 5mg a day is roughly average, and the procedure I did lasts 4-6 months, so I am starting at an average dose after having been on a 3mg a day cream without getting an improvement in my bloodwork.

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100). Day 1754

I have been very open about my dosing, my own bloodwork, and what went into why I chose to do it. Which, I’m glad, as the New York Times sure isn’t telling. Being very honest and open about details seems important as I have the privilege to experiment and I want others to benefit from that.

Because of minor complications, I’ve been attempting to be entirely transparent with those as well. The treatment itself is not dangerous and is tolerated very well, but I have had unusually high incidences of skin infections due to the IL-17 inhibitor I take for my chronic inflammatory condition, which led to a longer recovery than I’d have preferred.

Now that this is a full blown trend I promise to report back as I heal and as my blood work begins to show results. Until then, if you want to know what other trends I think will hit big and want to get ahead of the pack, remember I am just a message away. And I keep a shopping blog as well so you can buy what I buy before it shows up with a rave in the New York Times.

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Biohacking

Day 1755 and Slow Healer

I am on a TMI roll this week so you will have to excuse this old blogger. If my n-of-1 experiments help even one woman struggling with her health, it’s worth it to me to embarrass myself in public by sharing the real details.

I’ve come consider this blog not just a personal experiment in daily writing, but my contributions to training the artificial intelligences of our future. I shall write women’s health into the Akashic records, even if I have to write every single day. Oh wait

Today I am moderately concerned about mg pace of healing and if I have contributed negative to it by increasing my strain modestly.

Yesterday I wrote “want to see something gross” about how maximalist approach to healing the incision site where we placed testosterone pellets.

I thought it was going pretty darn well and I had physical evidence with photographs to prove it. I did however have two days of poor biometrics which I had thought was a result of pushing myself physically a bit too hard while in my two days of menstruation. I

have rip-roaringly bad luteal phases (hence the exploratory hormone therapy to bring my testosterone to a normal baseline) but I have blessedly short menstruation that hits hard but doesn’t stick around. Aunt Flow knows she gets a weekend, and it ain’t a long one, before she has overstayed her welcome.

Now I’m going to show you something a lot worse than gross pictures of an incision site. I’m going to show you embarrassingly bad Whoop metrics. And now that I see them laid out I realize I probably should have asked my doctor earlier if I needed to go back on a prophylactic antibiotic just in case cellulitis was lurking. Like my god my HRV and heart rate are god awful right now.

Now they were a bit wonky this month but this is some danger Will Robinson territory. I honestly didn’t feel bad enough that I took it seriously.

I thought “eh Whoop has been sucking” for me. I thought this is just adjustment and the high heart rate is the testosterone is kicking in and my low HRV is just adjusting to finally having some energy. I feel genuinely energetic for the first time in years.

But today at a check up with another doctor they noted that I was at higher risk of developing cellulitis given my history over the summer with the abscess surgery and the panniculitus it had revealed. The side effects of the immune suppressive called Bimzelx I use as an inflammatory dampener seems to mostly manifest in skin infections. So either I’m just a slow healer and being paranoid or I’ve got to rock on with some amoxicillin to get the ill’in to stop.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1754 and Do You Want To See Something Gross?

My inner child finds the idea asking if “you want to see something gross” to be funny. Of course, I want to see.

Gore and violence don’t get this reaction from me. I dislike it in movies and in the real world. But to see gross and the weird in the real world. I get it. Maybe lots of humans thinks seeing gross things are cool.

I think it is a bit sweet. It is as a very human reaction go “ewww cool” when faced with non lethal wounds. Maybe it’s truer with boys than girls, but if a kid said “do you want to see something gross?!” in Colorado when I was a tween the answer was a rousing yaah! Gross things are cool.

Maybe it’s a type of survival mechanisms where if we can learn more about what is lethal, and lethal injuries look like, it then improves our Darwinian fitness. We judge risk more accurately.

Flesh wounds need proper care and do turn out absolutely fine. And boy have we improved on the science of wound care since I was a kid. We have evolved past the bandaid.

When I first did my wilderness incident first responder training, I went worried I’d find the injuries we’d be treating emotionally challenging.

But even in a hard situation like a fire burn or the dermis getting sliced open, I still had a bit of that bravery of a little girl. That is cool! The bravado of a human who believes we can fix it

If you enjoy a story of plucky Rocky Mountain woman learning to do emergency care for herself and her community I’m glad we shared this time together.

Hopefully you never need these emergency skills. We take learn the risks and practice for them so we may never experience them.

So if you don’t feel this way, I’m giving you your ticket out of here. Stop reading now. But if you want to see something gross stay on.

For those who who are like “actually I want to hear all about getting your left butt cheek sliced open” to raise and normalize your testosterone levels by injecting tiny pellets of hormones though a steel dart gun via the scalpel entry point. Then it’s time to see something gross.

This is my wound on Wednesday morning after I had the procedure. It’s much bigger a slice than I’d expected but first time practitioners (I asked for the experiment) and while the treatment is safe across most vectors, I was a nervous immune compromised patient who prepared for the worse.

So this a real 10/10 “let’s see how it goes from here” experiment especially if the returns it delivers are real. I hope for the energy, pain tolerance and healing benefits the average patient sees

Now I am lucky enough to be an owner and finally user of my very own hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy. I wrote about it at length through trade wars and trips to Istanbul. We finally got the OxyRevo from China last month. I intend to upgrade to an HPOTech in our finished medical space (I believe HPOTech the best on the market currently)

So I am using a 90 minute full 2 atmosphere protocol already as I go went this treatment. I had also begun testing the GLOW stack from a peptide spot where I trust the owner. I’m helping him test. And this is the recommended stack for recovery.

.01 of the GLOW stack which is a regenerative peptide therapy with three peptides—BPC‑157, TB‑500, and GHK‑Cu—it was made to promote healing, tissue regeneration, and collagen production,

So I am absolutely throwing the gold care package at this. I am taking collagen and biotin, we’ve got the local food and the lack of seed oils, we’ve got the best current standard for peptides on injury and surgical recovery.

And somehow I am still scared. I never heal well or easily. I bruise easily and badly. I was so slow this summer to heal from an abscess surgery. I took a risk and I worried.

But I woke up this morning and my open wound has closed and the bruising has retreated in just five days to this. I’ll be in the scar mitigation territory in no time, and soon it won’t even be visible to the naked eye.

Day 5 of recovery from testosterone pellets

Progressively, the wound has moved from acute bruising and erythema toward decreased inflammation and resorption of bruising, with steady wound closure. Monitoring should continue, but the pattern suggests healthy tissue repair

So I hope you enjoyed seeing something gross. As it is keeping less and less gross by the minute.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1748 and Putting Testosterone Pellets In My Butt Cheek

Intrepid biohacker that I am, when I learned that my testosterone levels were concerningly low, I began on a program to raise them.

I started with nutrition and supplementation but I already had a diet and supplement routine that was evidence based for raising testosterone levels in women.

I added in DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) at 25mg. Six months of that brought me up to just about half of the lowest baseline acceptable. I was NOT getting adequate results.

My physician prescribed me a cream from a compound pharmacy which unfortunately didn’t agree with my skin. So we were going to get creative.

I had read a blog post from Cate Hall (whose husband Sasha Chapin had helped me on another entirely different vector of my life) on how testosterone pellets changed her life.

She had had teeny tiny testosterone pellets placed into her subcutaneous fat and had remarkable results in terms of energy and focus. This and that happened, and the summer was a mess, but today was the day I finally followed in her footsteps.

Vials of compounded testosterone

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100).

We’ll aim for labs at 4-6 weeks after insertion which would represent peak levels. We will repeat dosing at 3-6 month intervals. We will check levels at 4 months or so, or earlier if I feel the effects waning.

Do be warned that within a paragraph or so, there will be images of needles, scalpels, and some blood. So feel free to not scroll down further.

Part of the difficulty with dosing this stuff is that the pellet doses are wonky and frequently out of stock – estradiol comes in 6mg and 10mg increments so 8mg is impossible.

Naturally, we’ve made surprisingly little progress when it comes to women’s health, particularly as it relates to hormones.

Prepared and ready to go

But as I am happy to be a guinea pig and my luteal phase is a mess of migraines and misery I figured I had little to lose and much to gain. I was the first patient my doctor has done the procedure on so if anyone in Bozeman is interested, you can confidently give it a go with him as I’ve survived it.

These cool tubes don’t actually go inside too far but sort of shoot the pellet into the incisions

I was given a local numbing agent with epinephrine. I needed a surprising amount of it but I was a bit nervous. Once I was just able to feel pressure and no pain it was time to make a small incision with a scalpel and in popped the tiny bit of hormone on the left butt cheek.

No big deal at all.

But if you don’t want to see it going in don’t scroll.

Just giving you space to turn back.

A tiny incision in my goose bumped bum with the little pellets easily tucked in

I am all bandaged up and still riding the cortisone of it all but I feel alright. I’ll be adding in progesterone orally to temper the estrogen as that’s another matter. I’m excited to report back on it as if I have even a fraction of Cate’s experience with it I’ll be quite happy. Also it’s about $70 a month so not cheap but not at all expensive for something that could potentially mitigate some long term issues I’ve struggled with for years.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1723 and Hormonal Rollercoaster Rides

We spent a long time at the doctor’s yesterday as Alex and I gutted it out with our excellent physician (with AI assists) through a myriad of different tests. We were attempting to figure out why he keeps getting respiratory infections and why I’m such a tasty treat to skin bacteria.

In truth, my basic inflammatory biometrics have improved so much on the new IL-17a inhibitor Bimzelx that it’s probably worth the hassle of occasionally having to slice open a random effected gland or abscess once a quarter. It’s just a shocking amount of work to do whack mole with pathology reports.

What I don’t seem to be able to improve is my low testosterone and the flavors of migraine headache that come with the roller coaster of my luteal phase. Which is presumably a clue and we are following it.

Astonishingly my lady hormones are in tip top shape. Though the “you should have no trouble getting pregnant if we can get off the medicines that stabilize you” remarks remains a heads trip. Yes I asked.

It is not a head trip that makes one’s husband enthusiastic about the prospect. Which is fair, as we have no family support, no backup plans for me regressing physically, and the family that does support us can’t get to America. So one can see why a CEO husband with sick investor wife who would have to give up work, plus potentially messed up baby, isn’t super appealing. Anyways! TFR is a fun topic.

I started with basic supplements in the precursor category like DHEA and STRO about a year ago when my testosterone came in at a 2 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) when it should be somewhere between 9 to 55 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL). For context, adult men typically have levels in the 240–950 ng/dL.

The one sticky widget is that my testosterone remains stubbornly low. You wouldn’t think such a raging “see you next Tuesday” such as myself would be overburdened with the feminine hormones and lacking in ball buster hormones but I am.

I managed to eke it up to 5 with supplements and nutrition but it really didn’t match my otherwise excellent hormonal profile. Having ruined my chances at a healthy immune system when we tried the first half of IVF, I’ve spent some time working on and with my natural cycles.

Good information for all humans

I loathe being in my luteal phase but when I’m in my follicular phase I get 90% of my work done. We had presumed it was the rapid decline in estrogen and progesterone but maybe my floor rate testosterone was more of the issue.

For the past 8 weeks I’ve been using a testosterone cream that clicks up your dose and you rub it between your thighs. I know it’s gross. So I was curious to see where I might land. And praise the Lord I am now at 15 ng/dL. From 2 to 5 to 15 is some excellent progress but still below where we’d like me to hit. So we are going to run another test and try out the tiny pellets they slice into your skin. Since I’m already used to scalpels and antibiotics I figure why not?