Intro: This is the TRT Community Podcast, where we discuss all things testosterone.
Brandon: So, it’s the same day that we just recorded. We’ve got the same clothes on and the same people here.
Ian: Same hair and makeup.
Brandon: But, we’re going to batch some episodes.
Brandon: We’re going to talk about Erik’s updates.
Brandon: So, you are five weeks in?
Erik: It might be four and a half weeks.
Brandon: Four and five eighths.
Erik: I think this Thursday is going to be my beginning of my fifth week.
Brandon: So catch people up. You’re feeling bad. You got blood work done.
Erik: Yeah. So, went to Kevin’s office, got my first shot there. I didn’t talk about this, I don’t think. Yeah. So, the last time that we talked about this, I had not done it myself. So, my first shot, doing it myself, I had the shakes, and I’m, “This is so weird. I’m going to have to stick myself.”
Erik: And so, we’re creatures of habit, right? And so, I’ve gotten into a pretty good rhythm. What I’m about to say, I don’t think is endorsed by anybody. So, this works for me. But, so I do my shots on Mondays and Thursdays, Sunday night and Wednesday night.
Brandon: Mondays and Thursdays are actually owned by the NFL, so, you’re going to need to pick different days.
Erik: You can’t trademark days. I mean, they can have games on those days, but I can also inject.
Brandon: I don’t know that we’re allowed to say Monday or Thursday.
Erik: Fair enough.
Brandon: I’m going to have to bleep all this out.
Erik: So, the second day of the week-
Ian: Without express
[inaudible 00:01:39]consent.
Brandon: Do you start your days of the week on Sunday?
Erik: That is the way the week actually works.
Brandon: I don’t disagree, but I still think it’s weird to conform to that. So, you inject on Tuesdays? I’m just kidding. Go. Mondays.
Erik: I’m going to shank you.
Brandon: Shake?
Erik: Shank.
Brandon: Okay.
Erik: I’m going to fashion a shank out of a plastic spork. So, anyways, so like I said, this is not endorsed by anybody, but-
Brandon: Except the NFL.
Erik: So, Sundays, yes. So, Sunday nights and Wednesday nights-
Brandon: Sunday nights now. I’m just robbing the NFL of all days. They’re going to fine me.
Erik: This is going so far off the tracks.
Brandon: So, Sunday, Mondays, and Thursdays…
Erik: So, Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, I will actually draw the night before. I’ll leave my tea right next to the sink. I’ve got everything. I put the 27 gauge on, I set it next to it. I have my little air bubble in there because you told me that that’s the official way to do it, so I get all the liquid gold out of my syringe.
Brandon: Do you drop it on your skin too?
Erik: I rub it.
Brandon: Don’t do it.
Erik: And then, I do the HCG, and then, I put the HCG back in the fridge, so everything’s ready to go, because I’m, again, I’m a creature of habit. I like to be able to get up in the morning, I go to the bathroom, step on the scale, I do my injections, and then, I hop in the shower. Just-
Brandon: Yep.
Erik: Right? And, that works for me. Like I said, I don’t know if there’s any pros or cons to that. I’m probably going to get a bunch of hate mail after this episode for that. People saying I’m wrong.
Brandon: You can send the hate mail straight to Baylor of Carrollton because your leg’s going to fall off. So no big deal.
Erik: Cool. So, with that being said, things have… We were talking about this off affair. Two things that I’ve noticed, and the one has started to come on more recent, and the one was something that I was struggling with maybe 14 days ago, 10 days ago, and it’s subsided, but it was water retention.
Erik: So, I had water retention in my lower legs and ankles and things like that. That has since gone away. So, I’m good there.
Erik: But, I was also, more recently, what I’ve started to notice is, back to the days of the week, sorry, Roger Godell, but on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday afternoons, I start feeling a little bit of tiredness, and I think that’s probably me just being in a little bit of a trough, right?
Erik: It’s never Tuesdays, it’s never Mondays. It’s never any of the days right after. It’s always the day right before I need to inject again.
Brandon: Yeah.
Erik: And, it’s usually within that last 12 hours where I start feeling that. So, that’s really the only thing that I’ve noticed. I mean, I don’t have any acne anywhere. I don’t have any soreness. My wife and I were talking today, I do think I’ve put on a little bit of lean muscle. I think my arms and my shoulders look a little bigger.
Erik: They feel bigger, just you’re familiar with your body. My forearms feel a little bigger. So, that’s encouraging. I’m doing keto right now, and so my weight loss has just stalled, and I think it’s probably a little bit of the water retention, and I’m hoping that it’s a little bit of the lean muscle mass too.
Brandon: Sure.
Erik: But, yeah, I feel good. I think one of the things that’s been the most encouraging for me is, I was never happy with it, but it was just where I had settled in. It would be, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk after dinner?”, or “Hey, do you want to go to the park with our daughter?” And, it would just be, “Man, I’m beat, and I’ve worked today, and I just don’t want to do that.”
Erik: And, maybe it’s a placebo effect. Maybe it’s not.
Brandon: I wouldn’t think so,
Erik: But, it’s just the willingness to get up and do that and not feeling like I’m just drained, and just don’t want to do that. So, as a family, we’ll eat dinner and, if we have time, if it’s still early enough in the evening. I’m not going to interrupt with bedtime for our daughter, we’ll get up, and we’ll go for a walk around… We live in an apartment right now, but we’ll walk around the apartment complex, and it’s been fun.
Erik: It’s been fun to feel I have a little bit of control of my life again.
Brandon: Yeah. That was a good one for me. And, I was just talking to Kevin Clay about it yesterday at work. It was a combination, for me, of anxiety and fatigue. So, I was anxious about everything, and I wanted the clock of the day to go by as slowly as possible, especially Sundays. I wanted to do nothing on Sundays, so that it seemed that much slower.
Brandon: But then, once I got on testosterone, it’s Sundays don’t mean anything. It’s just cowboy day now and there’s no effect. I can do… My wife is huge on last minute plans and they don’t bother me. They were paralyzing before, so all that stuff.
Erik: I think I convinced myself that I viewed not going out and doing things as restful, and really, it wasn’t so much that it was restful as it was I wasn’t being honest with myself, and I just don’t have the energy to go do that.
Brandon: Yeah.
Erik: Right? And so, just like I said, having that feeling of I can go do what I want, I can, if I want to go do this, and just having the desire to go do those things is, I think, half the battle, and that’s been so exciting and encouraging for me.
Brandon: So, feeling significantly better, would you say, or… ?
Erik: It’s one of those things that it’s confusing because I didn’t have a lot of the symptoms that other people had before TRT. And so, to say that, mentally speaking, that I am not in this brain fog, I didn’t really feel I had a brain fog.
Erik: Maybe it’s TRT, maybe it’s other things at play. But, I’m in the process of switching roles at my company. I was really just dissatisfied with my job but wasn’t really saying anything to nobody. And, I was just showing up every day and just doing my job.
Erik: And, in the last, just, week, I had some conversations with the recruiters and had some conversations with leaders. “Hey, I don’t think that I’m getting utilized, and I’m actually looking around at other jobs and I really don’t want to leave because I like the company and the culture, but I just want to do something different because I don’t feel challenged.”
Erik: And, just, I think, maybe I’m attributing it to that. Maybe I’m not, maybe it’s not related to TRT-
Brandon: Could be.
Erik: But, just looking at, I’m finally just taking a step in a different direction and just using skillsets that I have that I’m not really using. Right? So, I’m moving, or potentially moving, from an operations position that’s more of an account management position over to sales. Right? And, I like sales.
Erik: They have a personality test that you take when you first start at the company, and all of my responses were off the charts.
Brandon: I can’t picture you in a sales role.
Erik: That’s interesting.
Brandon: That’d be perfect. Yeah, that’d be perfect.
Erik: Thanks, man.
Brandon: Yeah.
Ian: I can chime in on that and relate to your need to feel challenged at your role at work. I’m currently in that role. I mean, I’m not currently any TRT protocol right now, and also currently looking for another opportunity to broaden and use skills that I’m not using now.
Erik: Yeah.
Ian: And, it’s been the hardest thing. I’m not on it. I don’t feel motivated. I’m in a comfortable spot, paid decently, but through some encouragement from friends-
Brandon: Me.
Ian: No one in this room, I’m seeking opportunities and hopeful that there is an opportunity that I will be presented in the next week or two.
Erik: That’s awesome.
Ian: It’s been incredibly difficult to dig out of that. Not being on and not feeling… The other thing is, too, we’re all at this stage of we’re homeowners and parents. I’m not a parent, but husbands, and things like that, and sometimes, around the house, little projects build up and I’m very much of a person that’s, I like lists.
Ian: I like a punch list, basically.
Erik: Yeah.
Ian: So, Saturday morning, I’ve got a punch list. Go to Lowe’s, get this, get some fertilizer, do this, change this light in the house, clean this area, things like that. I think, I’ve got to tell you, there’s been no motivation to want to do those things. And, that’s where I’m hoping, and you’ll see in future episodes that I’ll be getting back on TRT very soon.
Brandon: Yeah, no, when Ian interviewed, I believe, in my place of business recently, the feedback that I received from the hiring manager was something like, “So-and-so would be silly not to hire Ian. Ian is the type of person that, even if you don’t have room for, you mention to so-and-so and make room for him.”
Brandon: I was, “All right.”
Ian: That’s high praise.
Brandon: Yeah, and this is not a person that beats around the bush. I did not expect her to have kind words, but I expected her to tell me.
Ian: Does she listen?
Brandon: To the show? Yeah, probably. Everyone listens to the show. Of course, she doesn’t listen to the show.
Ian: Number three podcasts in Malta and Malaysia.
Brandon: That’s right. We reached one 155 in the United States of America.
Ian: Heck yeah we did.
Brandon: Yeah. America. 155.
Erik: Coming for that top 100.
Brandon: You know how many podcasts there are? Almost a million, and I’m better than 900 and some odd thousand of them on, that one day, for that one episode. They don’t rate them-
Erik: For that half hour-
Brandon: … overall for that 12 minutes probably. They don’t rate… I wish they did. You can’t find subscriber numbers, which is frustrating, and you can’t find an overall ranking. You can just see where each episode ranks. So, it’s kind of frustrating.
Ian: Can I ask you, you mentioned brain fog. Was that something you were not struggling with that?
Brandon: No.
Ian: Okay. Because I, and this does not follow with the Ian episode, but that’s something I was definitely dealing with.
Brandon: Yeah.
Ian: It’s pretty scary.
Brandon: What is that? I mean, just because I’m on the outside of that symptom. What does that look like? Because you’ve been on it, and you’ve been off of it, so what does that look like?
Ian: It’s waking up in the morning, sitting down at your desk at work and just feeling really disconnected from reality. You feel like your memory is slipping away.
Brandon: Feeling like you’re not really even there.
Ian: Yes.
Brandon: In a sense.
Erik: Wow.
Brandon: It’s a depersonalization, almost.
Ian: Yeah, I would agree. And, you feel like memory, short term memory, for me, was a problem. Some friends would say I have a freakish memory of things that happened maybe 10, 12 years ago, but I can’t remember what we did last Saturday.
Ian: Things like that. I struggle with that still now being off of it. But, that was probably one of the key drivers of me getting on it last year and wanting to feel better in that sense.
Ian: Because you sit there, and it’s almost like you have to brain squint because you can’t really multitask.
Brandon: You have to write everything down.
Ian: You have to write things down, log it in your phone. Or whatever. Put it on a calendar, or something like that because you’re going to forget. You get overwhelmed easily with doing whatever your work.
Ian: And, it was really affecting my work, and just being able to focus.
Erik: Wow.
Ian: You can’t focus. And having had grandparents that suffered, one with Alzheimer’s, one with dementia, I don’t know the correlation there. I’m not well-versed in that enough, but it’s scary to think about your memory and your mind feeling like you’re slipping away. So…
Brandon: Sure.
Ian: It’s definitely one of the benefits, that’s amazing.
Erik: So, what does the opposite side of that look like? What did you notice… When you first started feeling like you were coming out of the brain fog, what did you notice?
Erik: Was it, “Man, I don’t have to write stuff down as much.”? Or, what was it?
Ian: Sharp. Yeah, you’re just sharp. I could multitask again. When I say multitask, meaning I could think about, these are two other things I need to be working on or get completed today, but I’m working on this other thing.
Ian: Having conversations on the phone with, with internal, external customers at work, and being clear your stream of just thought, and explaining to them to the questions that they might have.
Erik: Sure.
Ian: And. things like that.
Brandon: Sometimes I think that those are experiences that I’ve gotten to from TRT, and I don’t know if it’s true for me. I still have to write things down. I still work from a list with almost everything I do.
Brandon: I just don’t care. I don’t care if I’m not able to bring a clear thought. I don’t care that I’m having to use a list. The anxiety behind the shame that I would feel from those things is gone.
Brandon: I wouldn’t say I have brain fog. I’m fully capable of doing my job and excelling at it, but I use a list at work. I use a list at home, and I just don’t care about the judgment. You know what I mean? Some of those things are still there.
Erik: I think one of the most encouraging things that I’ve read in TRT community is the stories of people that talk about how they were on depression medication or anxiety medication, and they’ve actually been able to come off of those things just by going on TRT.
Brandon: Yeah,
Erik: Maybe that is not true for everyone.
Brandon: Yeah.
Erik: I don’t know if there’s a ton of scientific research that’s been done to back that up and say, “Yes, this is going to be true for everybody.”, but just reading those stories of the people that that is the case, that’s super encouraging.
Brandon: Yeah.
Erik: Right? Because maybe I’ve had bouts of depression after my dad died, or whatever. I think people have those ebbs and flows.
Erik: But, to say that I’m just a depressed person, or whatever. To say that I’m an anxious person, I don’t think I am so, so to know what that feels like, I can’t relate.
Erik: But, for people to say that they have struggled with those things, and that something as simple as just adjusting your hormones, right? That’s super-encouraging. That’s awesome. Right?
Erik: That’s what’s great about this community is, people sharing. For people that say that they have brain fog and to be able to come out of that. For people to say that they have low energy, to be able to come out of that. For people to say that they’re struggling with anxiety and depression, and et cetera, et cetera, and to come out of those things, just by improving their hormones.
Erik: That’s so encouraging. And, that’s what’s awesome about this group.
Brandon: We could bankrupt some really large medication companies.
Erik: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do it.
Brandon: And, obviously, it wouldn’t be not 100% of people could come off. But, I mean, my small poll, it was 86% or something, that have discontinued.
Erik: Did you just say you have a small poll?
Brandon: But, I don’t care anymore because I’m on TRT. So, your judgment means nothing to me. But yeah, it was like 86% of the guys that that answered the poll had come off of SSRIs, and when I talked to Kevin about it, that’s the bulk of our conversation is that, the medications that he’s on, and has been on, and the excitement behind maybe not having to continue those, because they don’t work.
Erik: Because my mind wakes up and just starts racing.
Brandon: Sure.
Erik: So, I’ve seen-
Brandon: It is close.
Erik: That can also be depression-related, too. So…
Brandon: Yeah,
Erik: I’ve never been one that struggles-
Ian: I’m not on any medications either. Yeah.
Erik: Sure. I’ve never been a person that struggles with sleep. So, very easily, I could sleep for 10 hours. This morning, my alarm, or daughter came in our bedroom at seven, seven 15. She’s six years old and she started to use an alarm clock, and she’s still getting up roughly within the same time period that her alarm is going off.
Ian: This is one with the light that says don’t come wake mommy and daddy during this time frame.
Erik: I wish. We need to figure something out like that. She knows how to go get her chocolate Cheerios. She needs to be a little more self-sufficient.
Erik: But, yeah, she came in at seven 15. I fell back asleep and woke back up at eight 30, right? I don’t struggle. I will wake up throughout the night, but that’s always been common.
Ian: Yeah.
Erik: But, yeah, I haven’t really struggled with sleeping or anything like that. I think part of the waking up for me, though, is, so like I mentioned, I think, in the last episode, I’m doing keto, which, just because you’re typically not eating as many vegetables, especially starchy ones like potatoes and carrots, and things.
Erik: When you’re eating those things, a lot of times, especially the really earthy, in-ground root vegetables, you’re missing out on certain nutrients and minerals and things like that.
Erik: So, I’ve been trying to take multivitamins now because it’ll help supplement that, especially with magnesium and manganese and those lower levels of those minerals will actually affect your sleep.
Erik: So, I’ve noticed it there, but that was before I started TRT, so I don’t think there’s a correlation.
Brandon: Interesting. So, Eric, your plan is blood work probably soon, right?
Erik: Yeah, so I’m probably a month out. My next appointment, I think, is October 16th.
Brandon: Okay.
Erik: So, I’m about halfway through the first… Let’s see how things are going. I feel really good. On a super-personal note, my wife and I have gone from maybe once, twice a week to having sex to-
Brandon: Third shift.
Erik: I mean, it’s two to four times a week consistently. And from an intimacy standpoint, that’s been really great for us. Right? I think sex isn’t bad for anybody. I think it’s good for mental health and physical health.
Brandon: Sure.
Erik: That’s been really good for our marriage, and it’s been funny. Just, again, this is super personal, but I feel like I’m a 16 year old kid again because I’m fascinated with my penis. Right?
Erik: Because I swear there’s just more blood flow down there, and it’s, “Oh, hey, what’s up dude?. So, yeah, it’s been funny but, like I said, the best way to describe that for anybody that’s listening, it’s I feel like I’m 16 again.
Brandon: Cool. Well, we will-
Erik: This whole section is getting cut out. I know it.
Brandon: No way. Why would it?
Erik: I don’t know.
Brandon: I’ll-
Erik: You’ll edit it though.
Ian: Brendan found a butterfly.
Brandon: Yeah. There’s a hair on my microphone. Oh, yeah, we’ll follow up with you after those… I want to go over the labs with you. Look at and see what’s doing.
Erik: I mean, just because I don’t have experience with it, is he pretty good about knowing what to pull and what not?
Brandon: Yeah, he’ll know what to check, but he won’t tell you by default. You’ll have to ask for a copy because his nurse will just call you and say, “Hey, your cholesterol, blah, blah, blah, and your prolactin.”
Brandon: And then, that’s really it. So, just ask him for a copy.
Erik: Yeah.
Brandon: Because we want to see what everything’s doing. We don’t want your life in his hands. We want it in the collective hands of this table. I don’t know.
Brandon: Sure.
Brandon: All right. That’s all.
Outro: Thank you for listening to the TRT community podcast. You can find us online at facebook.com/groups/TRTcommunity.
