AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

I asked the endocrinologist’s office to send me a copy of their lab results. They showed up a couple of days ago. The ones from the lab my regular doc uses have everything spelled out, with high and low ranges as well as the actual results. Alas, the lab the endo uses is much more terse; mostly just two or three letter abbreviations and some numbers. Five pages of it, though.

Interpreting that is going to take more than one evening on the web since I have no idea what’s important or what it might indicate in relation to other tests. That sort of research usually turns into multiple trips down the rabbit hole.

There was an article in a computer magazine long ago, talking about a particularly complicated “framework” package, where the author was annoyed that while some of the features were useful, it always wound up importing the entire library every time, since every function was connected to every other function in a big circular fuster-cluck. He said, “It’s like a gorilla with a banana. All you want is the banana, but you have to take the gorilla too.”

A more modern analogy would be “I went to YouTube to learn how to change the spark plugs in my F150, and three hours later I was watching a video on the mating habits of zebras.”

Are you feeling any difference from the test?

Ambient temperature is an annoyance with refrigeration. Some have a lovely range, others don’t. Something to look at in the specs next time. You can probably assume some over engineering, so if it’s close it’ll probably be OK.

I must admit I don’t understand all the prep work you are doing. I wonder if it’s essential or a mode of vacillating, giving you countless decisions to make and think about before you take the plunge to change your diet. You can do keto with minimal equipment and gradually expand as you go in directions that work from your experience. On the other hand it sounds like you had a crappy kitchen.

Sort of… but nothing I can really put a finger on. A little more energy and a little more alert. But according to the doc it can take a while for the effects to be felt, and splitting the doses in half, twice as often, means I’m not getting the same hit as once every two weeks.

I keep track of my sleep; I slept a lot less last week, in interrupted segments (as in “wake, read for a while, go back to sleep”) instead of straight through as normal.

It looks like procrastination due to complex housing and marital issues; effectively, I have no place to store or cook food where we live, and that’s not likely to change. Which meant setting up to cook elsewhere; in what could basically be considered a shed with a long extension cord. There the supplementary problems of temperature and not having running water. An average work day (not every day, just the days I can get something done) is one or two hours, sometimes three, and setting up a new kitchen hasn’t always had the highest priority of what time I have.

No running water sounds problematic. I hope you manage to finish it all soon.

My “shoot up every Wednesday” TRT plan came to a screeching halt. Too many months have five Wednesdays. Ditto Mondays, Tuesdays, etc.

The two-shot schedule is simple enough; the 1st and 15th-ish. Trying to evenly space the supply to single weeks, keeping in mind the prescription is monthly, required staring at a calendar for a while.

I took the first shot on Wed, 11/18. The second was on Wed, 11/25. But December has five Wednesdays, which doesn’t divide evenly into four. So instead of neat 7-day intervals, it will take an irregular spacing of 7 or 8 days to work around the months.

2021:
Nov: 18, 25
Dec: 3, 12, 20, 28

2022:
Jan: 5, 12, 19, 26
Feb: 2, 9, 17, 23
Mar: 2, 11, 20, 29
Apr: 6, 14, 22, 30
May: 8, 16, 24, 31
Jun: 8, 14, 22, 30

The usual biweekly prescription is clearly not optimal given it’s pretty much metabolized at 8 days, but it’s way easier than the kind eccentric injection schedule it takes to space it out. The implants are starting to look like a more-optimal solution; I made a not to discuss that with the doc when I see her again in June.

Last summer, during the long wait for the respiratory referral, I picked up a “volumetric exerciser” from Amazon, a Volodyne 5000. It got shuffled to the side and buried, and I discovered it yesterday.

You inhale slowly through a tube, trying to balance the weight of a bobbin in the flow meter while piston lifts in a calibrated well to measure volume. Basically, it measures how much air you can inhale at a specific, low rate.

According to the chart, I should be able to inhale 2600ml. Last night, the best I could accomplish was 2000. This morning, it was 2300. I found that posture has a significant effect.

I *told* the respiratory doc I was short of breath…

The devices are usually given to patients as exercise machines; some number of reps per hour. I’m not *that* weird yet; I figured mornings and evenings would be good enough to track any improvements.

The respiratory doc didn’t run any tests at all in the office visit; the appointment for those is still three weeks away. He was certain the problem was actually my heart, but that was 09/17 and I still don’t even have a referral for that.

I think I’ve been overthinking the TRT schedule. A sane person would inject on the first, seventh, fifteenth, and then split the difference between the fifteenth and the end of the month, however long that was.

“We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

I keep thinking about TRT. But I’m the kind of guy who would go with small doses on M-W-F. That’s closer to the way our bodies produce T anyway. Pretty sure that would also avoid the need for an AI.

There’s another schedule, not widely supported yet, of daily injections, where they use short needles and inject into the fat layer instead of deep into muscle. There are some papers about the shallow injections, with claims they’re about 20% more efficient than intramuscular. I plan to bring that up when I see the endocrinologist again next summer.

Yesterday and today, I was only able to score 1900 on the respiratory exerciser. I’ve been looking for “breathing exercises” on the web and have found exactly nothing useful; everything indexed seems to be “stress relief” or yoga stuff. Even the sports links, where I expected “increase lung capacity” would be a thing. Maybe my search-fu is weak, or it’s not something anyone cares about.

My resting blood oxygen level used to run 96-97, lately it has been 98-99. Interestingly, that started after the first TRT shot. But a sample size of one isn’t useful; it’s just as likely that the finger cuff meter is starting to read wonky.

Exercise is supposed to increase lung capacity. If you are involving your diaphragm, that should have positive benefits. So yeah, yogic breathing that trains for a full inhale (expanding ribs, diaphragm in use) and full exhale should help. Wim Hof breathing should help as well. Both will also relieve stress :)

Almost all the breathing exercises I’ve come across involve the diaphragm; unfortunately, the hernia and belly band cause problems with that. I might try holding my guts in with a hand while trying some of the exercises just for informational purposes.

The molds for the concrete barbell weights showed up. The weather is perfect for working on them, but I have too much other stuff that has to be done before I can get to that.

Yeah, you pretty much have to involve the diaphragm and move the ribs for maximum volume. Maybe try concentrating on the outbreath and making sure you are pushing as much air out as possible.

I’ve been getting more time in the Size Doctor extender lately. I’ve moved from no rods at all to 50mm of rods. Since I still can’t get a bone-pressed measurement I don’t know if any of it is added length (doubtful) but it has definitely been pushing the fat pad down, at least where the extender base sits. It also stretches the skin on the shaft; it used to put an uncomfortable tension on the scar band and behind the glans; now, it’s not really noticeable.

Adding rods increases the preload on the springs, just like a JES-style extender. The problem is, if you shorten the rods, it’s hard to keep enough vacuum to keep the glans in the bell. If you pull more vacuum, the bell slides down past the glans and tries to pull a donut on the shaft. So you have to have enough rods to keep the bell out near the sulcus where it belongs.

The “grower” thing and the short travel on the bell means it is usually difficult for me to put the extender on. A short pumping session (30 minutes) with the heating pad is enough to get the extender on easily; the extender also serves as the “cool-down” after the heating pad.

The inverted-U shaped base is a tight fit even with the open bottom. The knobs on the open ends are annoying; they’re not very large, but they add extra pressure points on top of the eventual “ball burn.” Which is mostly to the left side of the shaft for some reason. Looking at my logs, the stats are interesting: 1 hour, 15 minutes crops up most often before the burn gets so intense I have to take it off. The next most common number is 1 hour, 50 minutes. Then a bunch of random times, from 30 minutes to over three hours.

Some time ago I ordered some 5mm stainless steel threaded rods, eyebolts, coupler nuts, and thumb nuts to make a static extender base for the bell. For some reason the eyebolts have 4mm cross holes, so things are stalled until I can get some 4mm machine screws.

I wanted the static base because I was having a hard time getting the extender on; the idea was I could just run the nuts down until it was short enough to enter the bell easily, then run the nuts out for suitable tension. But my flaccid has gotten longer enough to make entering the bell less hassle, even if I skip the pump session first.

I take various vitamins and supplements in the morning, spacing them 5-10 minutes apart. I don’t take the same things every day. Vitamins and supplements can make the kidneys work pretty hard.

A couple of months ago I noticed I got occasional nausea when popping my morning pills. Sometimes just discomfort, occasionally oh-shit-I’m-gonna-barf. Through the process of elimination, I’ve determined that it’s the zinc supplements. They’re Rexall 50mg zinc gluconate caplets. This morning I used my pill cutter to chop them all in half; if the 25mg dose doesn’t give me the barfies I’ll just so the morning/evening thing.

TRT injection #3 was yesterday. Stab; OK. Aspirate; OK. Squirt; OK. Withdraw; stream of blood running down my leg. I guess I nicked a vein on the way out. I don’t know if I lost any testosterone or how much, but it was just normal-looking runny blood that stopped after a bit. The testosterone is thick and oily, and I didn’t see anything like that. I refrained from putting any pressure on the area for 15 minutes, just to make sure I didn’t force any out. I think it was more of a “shit happens” than a failure of technique.

Back when I took allergy shots I’d occasionally hit a vein and get some blood, but the allergy juice was way cheaper than testosterone cyprionate.