Not much going on here
Okay, so today I actually opened up the bottle of AndroGel 1.62% and applied one 20.25 mg pump. I was a little apprehensive about a headache, but it's been almost an hour, and I feel fine (even though I'm kind of dehydrated on top of that). This is weird, because twice I have administered 25 mg of AndroGel 1% and promptly gotten a headache that lasted for a few hours before going away (and then coming back off and on for a while longer). I was preparing to call my endo if it happened again because I have a good reason for trying to up my dose from "super-low" to just plain "low."
I have a theory for what's going on here. In the prescribing information, AndroGel 1% says to keep the application site dry for 1 hour after application, but Androgel 1.62% says to keep the application site dry for 2 hours. If that means AndroGel 1.62% takes longer to absorb, I wonder if I got headaches because I was getting too much T all at once rather than more steady absorption of essentially the same amount. It's either that or my body sees a really huge difference between 20.25 mg and 25 mg, which I sort of think doesn't make much sense if a "normal" starting dose of 50 mg works for all the other trans guys my endo prescribes gel to.
Other thing that is weird: the headache that I got from my most recent attempt at a higher dose felt like the kind of headaches I used to get from low blood pressure, which I haven't gotten since starting T some 15 months ago. The pain got worse when I was upright and better when I was prone, and I got dizzy when I stood up during the whole duration of the headache. Why would having a spike in T cause my blood pressure to drop? I think the mechanism that causes higher blood pressure on T is not an instantaneous one, but I need to do some research to find out if this makes sense or if I'm just drawing a line between two data points and claiming zero error.
In other news, I have very little to report indeed. I went to therapy yesterday and didn't have much to discuss, most of it about me trying to reinvent my image when transferring (eep) in a couple weeks because things with my mother actually went fine. Passing as a teenage boy isn't going to be enough if I want colleagues I'll be meeting for the first time who know I'm in my mid-twenties to perceive me as male, plus I've been kind of wanting to dress my age for a while now. Academics (in my field especially) dress incredibly informally, but I'm pretty much at the extreme end of that, and I think it would do me good to have more confidence in my appearance. It's not really going anywhere, but I feel like it should.
I have a theory for what's going on here. In the prescribing information, AndroGel 1% says to keep the application site dry for 1 hour after application, but Androgel 1.62% says to keep the application site dry for 2 hours. If that means AndroGel 1.62% takes longer to absorb, I wonder if I got headaches because I was getting too much T all at once rather than more steady absorption of essentially the same amount. It's either that or my body sees a really huge difference between 20.25 mg and 25 mg, which I sort of think doesn't make much sense if a "normal" starting dose of 50 mg works for all the other trans guys my endo prescribes gel to.
Other thing that is weird: the headache that I got from my most recent attempt at a higher dose felt like the kind of headaches I used to get from low blood pressure, which I haven't gotten since starting T some 15 months ago. The pain got worse when I was upright and better when I was prone, and I got dizzy when I stood up during the whole duration of the headache. Why would having a spike in T cause my blood pressure to drop? I think the mechanism that causes higher blood pressure on T is not an instantaneous one, but I need to do some research to find out if this makes sense or if I'm just drawing a line between two data points and claiming zero error.
In other news, I have very little to report indeed. I went to therapy yesterday and didn't have much to discuss, most of it about me trying to reinvent my image when transferring (eep) in a couple weeks because things with my mother actually went fine. Passing as a teenage boy isn't going to be enough if I want colleagues I'll be meeting for the first time who know I'm in my mid-twenties to perceive me as male, plus I've been kind of wanting to dress my age for a while now. Academics (in my field especially) dress incredibly informally, but I'm pretty much at the extreme end of that, and I think it would do me good to have more confidence in my appearance. It's not really going anywhere, but I feel like it should.