AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

As much as it can, until I take over the shopping. [sigh]

The pharmacy finally filled the testosterone prescription. It’s for “testosterone cyprionate 200 mg/ml”; a one-month supply of two vials, to be injected intramuscularly every two weeks. The cost through my regular medical insurance was $198/mo. My wife found one of those online “discount drug cards” (codes?) and got some knocked off that.

The needles looked awfully long; they were only 1-1/2”, but they were pretty indimidating compared to the insulin syringes I used to use for allergy shots.

Online instructions seemed simple enough; stab the center of your thigh, squirt, withdraw. However, a couple of the manufacturer sites mentioned that some people can have allergic reactions to testosterone. I have autoimmune disorder and a long history of allergies; I’m going to see what the doctor’s office will charge for a supervised instruction and to hang around the office for a while. It probably depends on whether their office management software has a billing code for that.

Dayyyumm that needle looks long.

Once you start exogenous testosterone you probably won’t stop. Have you exhausted the more natural ways of increasing testosterone (eating more meat, lifting heavy weights etc.).

There’ll be no heavy weight lifting until I can get knee and abdominal surgery, which requires losing enough weight for the BMI Gestapo to be happy. I don’t think eating more meat is going to be enough to bump my native testosterone level 500%.

The endocrinologist was adamant that losing even 100 pounds would be enough to get me off both Lisinipril and supplementary testosterone. I have my doubts, but I’d be thrilled. Until a few months ago I took no prescriptions, and hadn’t since getting off the anti-inflammatories 15 years ago, and allergy shots some time before that. I don’t like the whole pharmaceutical leash thing.

Even if I’m on it for the rest of my life, the usual “life expectancy calculators” say I have 9 years left. I have stuff in the refrigerator that’s been there longer than that.

I took the first shot yesterday, splitting the 2-week dose in half. I’ll take the other half next week. The half-life of injected testosterone is about 8 days; the friend who’d been taking it for years said the two-week schedule made him feel like he was on a roller coaster. I’d already noted the half-life thing and thought about that, so I decided to follow that schedule.

You can lift weights without involving the knees, at least.

It’s not just the meat/eggs that increase testosterone. That’s just the raw material to make testosterone. It’s removing the crap from the diet that subdues testosterone production. It’s also worth looking at plastics in use in your house (water/food storage, fire retardation chemicals on furniture etc.) and the actual quality of your water. If you are getting enough input from these estrogenic chemicals it throws things off.

Good luck with the exogenous test. I hope it helps.

I picked up a nice weight bench off Craigslist this morning. The seller threw in a long bar and five dumbbell bars. I still have the weights from the set I bought long ago, and I even know where most of them are.

Now to see what I can do with them without wrecking my knees or abdomen.

Have fun. Youtube is a great resource for this kind of thing.

I may not be able to do normal workouts, but I can do *something*.

There’s a lot you can do. Some upper body work (the obvious example is the bench press) use the entire body but you might find because the weight of your body is not on your legs completely you can handle that.

One other thing I meant to mention is Ben Patrick. He’s known as knees over toes guy (worth searching youtube for his podcast appearances). One of his messages that he pounds on and on about is that he manages to help people avoid knee surgery (having had it himself). He has a program on ATG online coaching which is $20 for the first month to access all the info and coaching if you want it. Price doubles after the first month but it might be worth joining and then messaging them for a routine designed for you. Some of his videos have his mom demonstrating, so he aims at all levels. I’m early on using his techniques and I have a history of fitness, so my experience won’t be yours and I’m not sure it will be useful to you but at $20 it may be worth a punt. Maybe you can drop the weight and in the process improve your knees to the point where you don’t need surgery.

I’ve had people point me at similar sites before, but I really don’t think there’s any benefit there. For a displaced medulla, or tendon problems, maybe… but according to the X-rays, the cartilage in the left knee is *gone*. It has been gone so long there’s visible wear on the ends of the bones where they grind against each other. No kind of exercise or therapy is going to change that.

The prehab/rehab stuff is all about range of motion, which isn’t a problem. I get more than 100 degrees before the pain level jumps, and another ten or so past that, which is normal for a Westerner who doesn’t squat to sit.

You noted that some time ago. There’s not much I can do about food packaging, but the lotion I was using for PE turned out to be full of pthalates. Phytoestrogens and xenoestrogens are all over the place. Flaxseed seems to be the worst, but it’s not too common. Soy, on the other hand, seems to be all over the place, apparently used for bulk or thickening like wheat.

I had been pumping at 2-3”Hg since last year; higher vacuum stretched the scars painfully. A couple of weeks ago I decided to man up and stepped it up to 4”, sometimes 5”. After the first couple of days the scars stretched and the pain level not only dropped below the usual, but parts of the scarred area feel normal. I can rub or even edge over them with no discomfort.

So, maybe they’d just stretched as far as they’d go, and needed some more cowbell.

The other interesting thing is that I’m not getting any edema at 5”, even with one-hour sessions. I’ve racked up over 500 hours in the tube in the last year, and I guess my shaft has gotten used to it.

For the last few weeks I’ve been using the heating pad. I’ve settled into a routine; 30 minutes with the Mityvac at 5” with the heating pad, 30 minutes cooldown with the tube and the breast pump at 2” or so, then usually the Size Doctor extender.

The extender still floats on the fat pad, but I’ve moved from no extension bars to 40mm. I can use 45mm, but that comes close to bottoming out the springs and I don’t want to risk another blister. I don’t think I’ve gained any length, it’s just the extender pressing deeper into the fat pad. I don’t know how much vacuum the SD bell is pulling, but from effects on my glans it’s a lot more than the tube. I’m mostly acclimated to that - it takes two or more hours to get the “walnut fissures” now - but the usual wear limit is discomfort from the base, mostly from the balls on the open end of the yoke shape. Looks like I’m going to have to cobble up some padding like some of the other extender users have suggested.

Fair enough. Missing cartilage is a hard one.

There are pthalates in almost everything :) It’s like finding ready made food that doesn’t contain seed oils or bottled water that doesn’t contain uranium.

Second testosterone shot this morning. Filling the hypodermic takes a while; the stuff is pretty thick. This time, emptying the vial, I aspirated some air while getting every last bit out of the vial, and had to hold the hypo up and tap it to move the bubbles up through the thick liquid before pushing them out with the plunger. I felt like a cheap actor playing a TV doctor.

This time a tiny drop squoze back out the needle track when I withdrew the needle. Probably $5 worth, given how much the stuff retails for. So far I’ve missed the nerves going in and there was only a slight twinge from the needle, but there’s some residual soreness after withdrawing it. That lasted more than a day last time. It reminded me of getting a penicillin shot. [flashback: a very long time ago, come to think of it; somewhere along the way oral antibiotics seem to have become the norm.]

I didn’t really notice much with the first shot; there was good EQ the next day, but that happens sometimes anyway, and there were a couple of no-morning-wood days after that. But I was talking to someone on the phone yesterday, and he said I sounded like I was “doing better.” He didn’t know about the TRT. I’ve been logging “mood” for several months now, and for lack of any useful standard scale (“standards are wonderful, there are so many of them!”) I’ve been using “down”, “flat”, and “up”. Almost all “flat”, with a handful of “down”, but some “slightly up” after the first TRT shot. Which might be more psychological than anything else, but I’ll take what I can get.

Electrical upgrades are mostly done. I have a full 15 amps for the cooking stuff with nothing else sharing the circuit.

Now I’m faced with the problem of food storage in freezing weather. After considering the options for a few weeks I ordered a 48-quart plastic cooler for $17 and a programmable 110v temperature controller for $22. I have a 110v, 30w(?) flexible plastic “lizard heating pad” I ordered some time back with the idea of wrapping a pump tube with it, but it wasn’t quite flexible enough. I’ll set the controller to keep the inside of the cooler above freezing. Canned goods, bottled sauces, etc. will go in there. It doesn’t have to keep things warm, just “not frozen.” I expect to spend a lot of time unpacking and repacking the contents, as Murphy’s Law suggests whatever I’m looking for will always be on the bottom of the cooler. Fortunately when freezing weather ends I can move everything back to the cabinets.

The other problem is, when flipping through the manual for the “dorm refrigerator”, I saw a warning that it was not for use in ambient temperatures below 50F. Whaaaat? Some reading indicates the problem might be that the freezer-compartment thermostat might get confused. There were no warnings in the freezer manual, though the web says those may have problems too. I picked up a couple of cheap freezer thermometers from eBay. I’ll watch the temps when the cold weather settles in and see if I need to get some thermostatic switches to turn the refrigerator and freezer off when it gets too cold.