folio

I wish I had understood the importance of testosterone therapy twenty years ago.

Yes, I know my beloved asked me regularly, “Are you keeping up with your injections. It’s important.”

I have no one to blame but myself. Yet, despite everyone telling me it was important, I never really got why.

Of course, there’s the obvious. But it was explained mostly as key to making me less tired, and avoiding problems with weak bones.

I really had no idea how central it was to so many aspects of my wellbeing.

Though I’ve suffered from brain fog and short term memory recall my whole life, I never linked it to low testosterone.

I’ve also had frequent and long-lasting periods of low mood, depression and anxiety for decades. Again, I did not link this to my condition.

Then there’s my body shape: the excess fat in all the wrong places, and poor muscle tone everywhere else.

These thoughts occur to me right now because I can feel my levels are waning.

I feel it in the fact that I find myself getting inexplicably emotional suddenly. And the return of the shyness that disappears shortly after every injection.

Though I was diagnosed two decades ago, it is only for the past two years that I have consistently followed up on this intervention.

For the preceding three years, I shunned it completely, while over the fifteen years before that, I took it extremely irregularly, often with long gaps in between.

These past two years of consistency seem to have had a huge impact. Now I wonder the difference it could have made to my life over two decades, had I taken it seriously.

Take ambition, for example. What changes might I have made years ago? Take that pervasive low mood, for another. How might a happier state of mind have affected my relationships?

The reality is that I simply didn’t understand what it was that my body and mind were missing.

Accentuated, possibly, by the fact those administering the therapy often don’t understand either.

When I once asked my consultant — about ten years in, during one of my lapses — why I needed testosterone therapy, he simply said, “So you don’t get osteoporosis.”

Never have I ever been asked about my cognitive deficits, low mood, passivity, or lack of ambition. It took a total meltdown to bring this to the fore.

Now I understand.