#hrt help

If you’re looking for a source of hrt lemme know and I’ll give you the site I use

HOWEVER

you can safely ignore it, the only reason that label's still there is that it'd cost money to add "or subcutaneous" to it.

hiya gorgeous :)

as a very young child, I was diagnosed with Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura, which means that my immune system eats my blood platelets sometimes. I had to get my blood drawn a lot to monitor my platelet count, over time I developed a strong fear of needles and eventually had to be physically restrained during blood draws, which left me with a massive needle phobia. pretty much the only part I didn't get was vasovagal syncope (passing out at the sight/thought of needles).

it took me a week and two separate instances of putting an entire bottle of wine into myself to do my first injection, nowadays it's more like doing the dishes than being in active combat.

with full knowledge of just how fucking terrifying it is to inject yourself: I promise you can do it.

quick post because it came up in conversation: when doing injections, the total volume of the syringe matters. this is most applicable to girls using higher concentrations e.g. 40 mg/ml enanthate, where your weekly dose is something like 0.1ml. here's a comparison of (left-to-right) a 0.1ml dose in a 0.5ml, 0.3ml, and 1.0ml syringe:

because the plunger has to travel farther for each fraction of a milliliter, it's easier to be precise and accurate. a good rule of thumb is to try to avoid measuring anything <10% of the total volume of your measuring device, so 1ml is acceptable but not ideal for our 0.1ml dose

this isn't something I see discussed a lot, so please do let me know if you have questions!

(tbh I don't think total volume is the true main factor, you could absolutely make a several-meter-long 1 liter syringe that's accurate down to 0.1ml.... but in practice, "total volume" is accurate enough)

I know they have different suggested injection schedules and whatnot, but I'm curious, is there any noticeable difference in the experience week to week of being on the different forms?

My doc gave me a Valerate prescription, but I see a lot of girls on Cypionate and a couple with Enanthate so I'm just curious. I figured either you'd know or your followers would! I'm probably gonna diy after this first prescrip because it's a bit expensive to do it the other way, and I wanna know as much as I can about the cost/benefit of each type. I've looked it up a little but not found much concrete about what the actual experience is like (tho the diy site may have some stuff deeper than I looked I'm not sure).

Thanks in advance, ily Lily :3

I reblogged it just now, but I talk a little bit about the different esters here. you are finding an absence of evidence for a reason, the only real difference between them is that they release at different rates. they all get metabolized into estradiol in the end :)

I prefer enanthate because it's half-life is perfect for weekly dosing, and if you're doing DIY I can recommend you buy that without reservation. cypionate is fine too.

now onto the question. I just got back from planned parenthood and got a prescription for estradiol injections (yippee!). What's got me anxious is that she only prescribed the estradiol, no anti-androgen. I think she was saying something about seeing my bloodwork in three months before considering any blockers like spiro. Does this sound normal? The justification sounded fine while I was there, but I'm a bit anxious with all this being new and need some reassurance

that is called estradiol monotherapy, which is what I do :)

your body has a feedback mechanism for how much sex hormone you have in your blood. if you have enough, great, no need to make any more. crucially, it doesn't discriminate between T and E, so raising your E directly lowers your T (by reducing production). a term for this is "gonadal suppression"

It's like, if I don't see the expected results within the expected time frame I just up my dose. If I see adverse effects associated with a too high does I lower my dose. If I start feeling sick I go to a doctor.

And if it makes me sick? Well death before detransition. If I can't live with the body I want there's no point.

you're thinking about this backwards. we're kept from accessing a lot of medical resources, blood tests are way easier to get done than HRT, why not take advantage of it?

I call what you're describing "vibes-based dosing", I tried that. I shot my E levels to ~750 pg/ml entirely by accident, stopped doing that, and felt better afterwards. I was very surprised by all of this information, including the fact that I needed to lower my dose to feel better, which I only learned by getting a blood test. it is all well and good to trust yourself when it comes to how you feel, but I'd like for you to have more respect for unknown unknowns here. anecdotal evidence has value, but it works best when paired with hard data.

if you come to me and say, "I need help adjusting my dosing", guess what I'm going to ask first? if you don't have a blood test, I'll still try to help, but the quality of advice will go down wildly. we have very little research to rely on, much of what we "know" is more like educated guesses, which also work best when paired with hard data.

you can't exactly hurt yourself, it's pretty hard to do that with HRT, but you can make yourself feel like shit for no reason. do you know what having your testosterone be too low feels like? how would you find out without knowing if your testosterone is low? "I feel kinda like shit" is easy to say in-the-moment, but like. is that because of your hormones or because you haven't eaten in a while or well you have been getting to bed late and etc etc etc. you get the idea

here's something you'll definitely care about: there's a theory that having your E too high early in transition is detrimental to breast growth. we don't know if it's true, but we do know that most people only need estrogen levels at like 200-250 pg/ml to adequately suppress testosterone production. why risk it?