This is what I get for waiting a week to update. My apologies if this entry is a bit sloppy. I’m still tired but wanted to get an update posted.
After my last post, I went ahead and gave myself a second half-dose of testosterone in the opposite thigh the following Friday. With the uncertainty surrounding the initial injection as explained in my last entry, some phone calls were made to ensure I wasn’t about to do anything stupid, and with my endocrinologist having given me the option of a full or half-dose for my first injection, I decided to just make it a full dose total for my first injection via two half-doses with the approval of my doctor; I admit I was feeling fairly antsy to get a first dose in my system that I was confident was administered correctly, and I could have just as easily waited two weeks. Ultimately, and thankfully, nothing adverse ever came of the injection the nurse assisted me with, at least not so far, but it was concluded by everyone we called, including the office at which she works, that she should not have used such a short needle for an intramuscular injection.
In any case, the second injection went fine. This time it was with a 1.5″ needle. For those with needle anxiety seeking a bit of reassurance with this process, I’d like to try to assure you it’s far less of a big deal than you may think. I myself don’t have a particular aversion to needles, but being anxious I can’t help but not trust that I will do it right. It is a bit freaky to do it to yourself the first couple times for most people, I’d think, regardless if you are phobic of needles or not. You get everything prepped, the site cleaned and your hands gloved and the syringe properly filled and aspirated and aimed at your target meat… and, at least for me, there was this brief pause of “Hmmm. I’m about to sink a couple inches of metal into my flesh.” But, well – then I did. The needle is so thin, I only barely felt it penetrating the surface of the skin, and I would not call it painful to any degree. It just slid in. The testosterone is suspended in an oil and is rather thick, so it takes a bit of effort to slowly push the entirety of the dose in. Other than that, given one does everything safely and cleanly in the way instructed, it’s not a big deal.
So, again, that went just fine. About 12 hours later I began feeling an ache in the entirety of the muscle into which I’d injected – something I was fully expecting. It lasted a little over a day and then subsided. Nothing crippling.
Later into that weekend, I began feeling what I perceived as the first effects. It’s admittedly been hard to tease apart what is a literal effect of the hormones, what is a placebo effect, and what is simply a resulting feeling of being officially on the right path. I’m probably guilty of crediting all sorts of little inconsequential and irrelevant things on my first T injection, but after sorting out my thoughts, these are the changes I ended up attributing to the hormones – whether transient or more permanent, we’ll see.
I first noticed I felt increasingly generally comfortable. It didn’t dawn on me immediately. I am a chronic sufferer of anxiety, especially social anxiety. In going out, I noticed I felt less “vulnerable” and “raw” around other human beings. Less burning on the back of the neck, less feeling dread upon seeing another person in an aisle I need to go down. It was slight and almost undetectable at first, but it began to become more conspicuous and discernible the more I went out, to my wonder – it was absolutely not how I was accustomed to feeling in public. I eventually began wanting to test myself, to go out and expose myself to these stimuli that would generally send me straight into my shell. I found myself, while still as socially inept and awkward as I’ve always been, able to talk to strangers a bit – to make sure my “thank you”s were audible, to step up to a counter without feeling like I’m walking through a wall of acid – to handle the most basic requirements of necessary social exchanges without feeling anxiety. It may not sound like a lot to someone who doesn’t struggle similarly, but this is very valuable to me, and it has had me fantasizing of how I can hone and foster this into something even more rewarding.
At home, I began feeling the subtle lessening of anxiety spread out more generally. The best way I can explain it is that things simply stopped bothering me as much. It wasn’t that I was becoming numb or less perceptive, just that I wasn’t overreacting to certain stimuli. I wasn’t spending my day squirming.
I have a history of anxiety-induced sleeplessness – sometimes periods of full-on insomnia. I can’t shut down my mind consistently with any method, and I have tried countless methods. Reading, meditation, ASMR videos, self-hypnosis, melatonin supplements – many things over many years. My mind is ablaze, no matter how exhausted mentally or physically I am. I think about everything, both positive and negative things. I worry about the time; I worry about being able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. It’s always too hot or too cold. I feel uncomfortable. My blanket is folded weirdly against my leg. My toe is sticking out of my blanket. My pillow is not perfectly tucked between my head and arm like I need it to be. Every molecule in my body is not properly aligned in order to allow me to sleep.
That weekend, I noticed a difference. I slid into bed one night, and noticed that I was just… comfortable. I was fascinated. I tried different positions. I felt like I could fall asleep in any position. And I was able to. I fell blissfully asleep and woke up refreshed.
The general comfort spanned outwards to other things as well. I felt like my daily worry pestered me far less. I didn’t feel quite as jumpy or irritated. I felt a little more focused and hopeful, less easily perturbed.
All these feelings continued to increase, more quickly than I could keep up with. Early the following week, the comfort took off into what I perceived as a high. I couldn’t help but wallow in it a bit. I began imagining a future in which I didn’t struggle daily with anxiety, and this fed the high. I could easily see myself male – both in my head, and in the mirror, despite still not being able to pass as such most of the time (though I did at the store on Monday or around then – the cashier said “Have a good evening, gentlemen,” to my husband and I). I could easily visualize my future as one that was good by my own personal definition. I was so overwhelmed with the prospect of finally feeling right that at several points, I broke down in tears of joy, or simply sat in silent awe at what I was feeling. I admit it was hard to concentrate on work because my world just felt quite suddenly… fascinating.
When I described all this to my husband, and told him I’ve been feeling high, he remarked, “What if that’s not ‘high’ at all, but comfortable?”
If that’s the case, I don’t have the capacity right now to lament the years I spent dicking around being miserable and squirming. I don’t know that I will ever consider them wasted. Possibly better spent, that’s all.
In any case, I do not imagine I will be in a euphoric state for the remainder of my life. I believe that things will stabilize, and I will adjust, and begin to take for granted that I am the correct sex like much of the population does. That said, I have reason to believe that the level of chronic, everyday crippling discomfort I felt before is, perhaps, a thing of the past. I can’t properly express what this means to me. It is profound, miraculous. I still have a hell of a way to go with all this, but it all seems very doable now that I’ve started. It no longer intimidates me.
And yes, there has been a distinct increase in my libido. It began around the same time the rest of this did, and it developed into something that has been, at times, uncomfortable in way that I haven’t been able to ignore too well yet. There has been a lot of sudden slinking off to the bedroom for private time. It verges on absurd at times, until I can read into just about everything in a sexual way and become aroused. I’ve also become more visually sensitive in this regard. Imagery appeals more. Actually, everything appeals more, in a sexual sense. Being touched is exciting. Reading text is exciting. I am sexually excitable. I feel like a teenage boy, and I feel like I’ve had a boner for the better part of the past week. This is significant to me especially, because I’d been struggling with lack of libido fairly consistently throughout the past two to three years.
So, things have been going brilliantly so far, at least until this morning.
I went to bed last night feeling noticeably off for the first time since starting T. I felt uncomfortable, but in a way that was vague and strange to me. There was nothing I was psychologically distressed over (not to imply I’d really ever had solid reasons for being anxious in the past, but this was quite a bit different), and there was really not a whole lot for me to pick apart beyond the fact that I was feeling restless and less than good. A stubborn ass, I went to bed without taking my anti-anxiety medications, though I mostly just reasoned that I wasn’t feeling anxious because I wasn’t having anxious thoughts. I fell asleep after about an hour of tossing and turning.
I woke up very suddenly at around 7:30 AM this morning, which is early for me and my schedule. I lied there for a moment, and for the first few minutes I just felt frustratingly awake and alert when I had a good four hours of sleeping left to do, especially considering when I managed to fall asleep. The alertness turned into a tangible physical restlessness that was so uncomfortable it prompted me to get out of bed. My heart started pounding and racing. I felt hot and nauseated and dizzy, and was shaking fiercely, my hands trembling, and I was hyperventilating and had a definite tightness in my chest. I had no idea what was happening to me, and after pacing around in the bathroom for a couple minutes trying in vain to take measured breaths, I concluded reluctantly that something was very wrong – that I was possibly having early symptoms of either a heart attack or stroke. I woke my husband up and he drove me to the emergency room.
I had trouble breathing all the way there, but felt mentally calm despite my heart pounding out of my chest and shaking like a leaf. I definitely felt on the verge of either vomiting or fainting or going into cardiac arrest – maybe a glorious trifecta. The triage nurse took my vitals and I was almost instantly escorted back to a room due to my tachycardia and high blood pressure. They put in an IV, took blood, ran an EKG, took several x-rays of my chest, had me pee in a cup. My husband and I were increasingly baffled as they came back with the test results of each, confirming that everything was normal and healthy. More perplexing still, about forty minutes or so in, my heart steadily settled down to a normal pulse, and my blood pressure was healthy again. My shallowness of breath subsided. When we were left in the room in privacy for a few moments, I wondered: what if I had just had a horrific panic attack, but without the anxiety? Just the physiological components thereof, exclusively. Is that possible?
What the fuck is my body doing?
We asked the nurse when she returned – perhaps a little more eloquently. I explained that I had been feeling minimal to no anxiety since beginning on hormones, but have a history of severe anxiety with panic attacks prior to that. I wondered if my body could essentially be going through the motions of an anxiety attack without the anxiety, and she said that, yes, it is possible. Residual, ingrained anxiety response to nothing in particular? Sounds like something I’d be capable of. Definitely my style.
In any case, my mind was blown. It was beyond bizarre. The entire time at the hospital I felt positive, fully mentally present, and even engaging in jokes and such with the nurses. Mentally, I felt fine. I felt good – well, as good as you can feel after dragging yourself and your spouse out of the house to go commit to a morning in the hospital. My body was going nuts, but my mind wasn’t following suit, despite a panic attack generally calling for that in the reverse order in the first place.
It was no wonder I initially didn’t know what was going on when it happened, despite being unfortunately quite familiar with how a panic attack feels. I just woke up after some completely irrelevant, not at all distressing dream, and had a full blown, hour-and-a-half long anxiety attack, but while laughing, joking, and feeling generally calm and collected throughout the entire thing.
If this is indeed what happened to me, it also puts some perspective on just how distinctly physiological and how distressing and draining anxiety can be outside the realm of the mind itself. Having access to full mental acuity while experiencing physical panic attack symptoms is not something I’d ever experienced before today, by, y’know… the very nature of a panic attack. I’m used to being curled in a self-loathing ball in the corner of a dark bathroom, absolutely terrified and full of dread and doom and thinking I’m going to drop dead at any moment. It was enough for me to suspect that I was having a heart attack or stroke and go to the hospital, and I hadn’t been in the ER for about six or seven years prior to today, so it’s nothing I jump to particularly quickly.
I contacted my endocrinologist to get her opinion, and ended up leaving a message with her nurse. I will also be contacting my gender therapist and psychiatrist to get their take. I figure if anyone’s familiar with something like this, they would be. For now, should I start feeling strange like this again, I will just be taking my anxiety medication and seeing if that helps.
In the end, I figure I really can’t fathom everything my mind and body is being subjected to right now, or will continue to be. Strange things are bound to happen, both good and bad.
Beyond that, my insides have also been throwing a bit of a fit. My uterus is pretty upset about this turn of events, and has responded by giving me a horrible period that I think is just now beginning to taper off after a straight week of heavy bleeding. Having had a weird menstrual cycle in the past, though, it’s nothing I’m not at least somewhat used to.
All in all, things are going very well outside of the excitement this morning. It all feels incredibly promising and I believe that it will only continue to settle out and improve.
milomorphosis 