she/they/it // powerlifting the pain away

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • oh my God I’m sorry that happened to you :( HRT management is so fucking simple, I’m honestly shocked at how many doctors just wing it based on their own conceptions instead of doing the very easy very standardized processes most everyone follows.

    had kind of the opposite situation happen to me, my primary care prescribing my hormones was an older dude with trans folk on his staff, everything seemed like it checked out, all I really needed was prescribing the same regimen I’d been taking with some occasional hormone panels.

    for a while it was “too early” to get hormone panels, though he was taking blood draws for liver/kidney panels every time I saw him (oftentimes without even making clear that’s what he was doing) 6 months later I was not feeling great and asked if we could do a hormone panel to rule out some things, he explained that he felt like “the online trans community” focuses too much on the numbers and his plan was to increase dosage until it showed up on my liver/kidney panels. I wasn’t really sure but giving me enough estrogen for my liver/kidneys to start filtering it out of my blood seemed wrong and so I insisted on one anyway.

    a week later he sent me an email basically saying “so because you were complaining about it so much last time, I went ahead and did it anyway and LOOK it’s fine!” Attached were lab results that were not at all fine - it was waaaaay high out of range and it wasn’t even a trough reading! (somewhere around 2000 pg/mL IIRC) I was confused at how this happened, given I didn’t even think we changed my dose?

    So then I looked through my records and it turned out he’s been silently increasing the vial concentration without changing the amount drawn - pretty much the ideal way to increase my dose 8x without me noticing. I shoulda paid attention to the listed concentration on the vials I was getting, but we didn’t discuss a dose increase at all so I didn’t really have any reason to suspect a change.

    So I bring all this to him alongside the physical symptoms I’d been feeling and ask for an explanation. Once again he started into the “you’re just too focused on the number” stuff. He also said my physical symptoms sounded like anxiety and that he could prescribe an anti-anxiety med. Immediately stopped seeing him and just did DIY for a while instead.