Yesterday, I attended my very first protest rally. It appears that the Liberal National Party of Queensland is following the playbook of the orange idiot in the states. As much as I hate linking to a News Corp Australia website… this article made my decision to attend the National Day of Action in my state.

Peter Dutton has hinted he supports US President Donald Trump’s moves to stop trans people competing in sport against biological girls, declaring that allowing it to occur is “not in the spirit of sport.”

I am glad I had a support person with me yesterday and we were in one of the safest “Yes” vote regions of my state for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which ultimately failed. But hearing the Welcome to Country made me tear up something fierce. It really pisses me off how this entire system is built against us, the people. What scares me the most is that, I honestly don’t know if we’re smart enough as a nation to realise we are being divided and conquered.

Hearing the stories from the speakers had a similar effect. Very emotional and relatable. So I have no issue saying a big fuck you to the Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls for fucking with people’s lives like that. You have no fucking right.

I’ve now donated and signed the petition. And I am going to (politely) hassle the hell out of my local members of parliament and remind them know that trans rights ARE human rights. You Liberal Party dickwads just pissed me off something fierce.

In other news, I’ve been able to use Jetpack Social to finally link my Bluesky, Mastodon and Tumblr accounts. Anything Meta owns (Facebook and Instagram) has been purged thanks to their terms of service being updated to allow hate speech.

Unfortunately, it seems we are living in interesting times. It’s time to protect and support those that need it the most. It’s time to push back before we find ourselves with the right wing completely in charge of our lives.

A trip down memory lane back to July 2023 where I look into the Banksia Wave SP 336. I ramble and ramble on about whatever was on my mind back on that sunny day.

Only watch if you want to listen to me rambling. More videos coming up and we’ll do a deep dive into this modem and get the drivers on the server. I think I actually ripped the CD and photo copied the box artwork for this too! Stay tuned! 😄

Well, university has been a big false start. I’ve gone with option 4 from the last blog post. That’s dropping all subjects and reapplying to UAC after I get all my other stuff in order. My other stuff is my life… getting my life in order, should be an easy task right?

I’ve been trialling medications (as always) and found I take less selfies of myself when not on pregabalin. I suppose I find that I am less accepting of myself. It’s strange. Almost like my baseline self doesn’t like me so much I need to be somewhat not me.

That could be the autism talking though. That’s right, I’m autistic. Which is actually kind of neat and explains a lot. I’ve had a few independent people suggest it and a psychiatrist confirm it. I am very happy with that. It helps me understand myself a little bit more.

In the past month, I have had a very productive psychiatrist session. Let me just say these trees outside of Museum train station were more vibrant than they have ever been. In the session itself, trauma was unpacked. Organised and packed back away. It feels so strange to open up completely to a person external to your own self.

One year ago I abandoned my pursuit of the disability support pension (DSP) because my psychologist at the time didn’t think it was feasible. Now I am seeing a psychiatrist who is more open to discussion on the subject rather than shooting me down. So we’ll see where that leads.

Also had an appointment with my endocrinologist - all my blood work is looking good. 5,000 IU per day of D3 appears to be increasing my phosphate levels. If it keeps increasing then I can look into getting a shot of 600,000 IU intramuscular D3 that should last a while.

I was given this controller as a gift to go with an Xbox I found on the side of the road in May. The batteries had leaked (as they do). So it needed an inspection and clean.

The contacts were a bit corroded so I figured I’d fix it up.

And fixed!

I sourced a new third party power supply and it actually worked! Armed with a working controller, power adapter and functional console… there was only one thing left to do. Bend it to my will. It must play all the games! Mod time!

Oh good, really small points that need soldering. I mean I’ve softmodded a Wii before… and installed modchips into Xbox OG. How hard can an Xbox 360 be?

Ehhhh, it was kind of annoying. PLL points and all that jazz.

But the Pico Pi finally has a use beyond blinking an LED or blinking multiple LEDs.

So much could have went wrong…

But it didn’t. It actually worked. I’m still capable of following guides and doing tech-related stuff. Then I remembered I had to drop uni. So I did. After census date, which creates a bit more hassle but nothing I can’t probably handle.

And then of course this result comes through on the day I submit my request to drop my degree. I bet I get a lower mark next time around. Ha ha!

I binged all of The Owl House. Amazing show, I highly recommend it for anyone. Season 3 was just the icing on the cake.

The first cicadas of spring have appeared, the itty bitty Silver Princess cicadas. The larger cicadas aren’t due until mid-November if my calendar is correct.

Until they appear, we have plenty of skinks in my window frames nearly being squished every time I open the window…

And the lizards that hide in the garden getting watered - sorry little guy! Apart from all that, I started writing in a journal to capture some of my thoughts, and so far so good. It feels nice when awake at 3am to capture some of the things that are bouncing around in my head.

University has shown me even more great people and just love being around them. I love listening. Not sure what it is. Now, I just need to wait for the 3rd October when I’ll hopefully receive an offer for university in 2025. Fingers crossed! 🙃

I’ve met some amazing people at university so far. Most of them are in the queer space. Scratch that, they are all in the queer space. These are young adults who are going through a lot but for the most part seem to be excelling at what they do. I envy that. There was a time when I was like that.

My current medications, pregabalin and clonazepam, have been amazingly helpful on the social side of things. I have dealt with more people on a consistent basis than I have in the last 20 years of working in semi-retail. Worth noting that I’ve had to up the selfies so I can keep a track of changes under estrogen.

But there’s always a catch, isn’t there? There’s this damn trade off between sociability and being able to think, but it’s even worse because if I am in a social situation I can’t think anyway. My brain just does a whole bunch of other things instead of the work at hand.

So pregabalin and/or clonazepam (even though I haven’t got the doses ideal yet) are perfect. Clonazepam should only be used short term, but pregabalin can apparently be used long term with no issue. So what do I do? The way I see it there are three options.

1. Should I reduce the levels of pregabalin and cease clonazepam? This would likely result in me reverting and just abandoning study.

2. Should I carry on at full force and hope for the best even though my brain looks like Morgan’s scrambled eggs? (Visualise the most heat denatured protein you have ever witnessed).

3. Should I perhaps drop the loading down to 0.25 full time, at the very least to maintain access to the queer collective - which I am finding amazingly beneficial to be a part of.

4. Or… drop all courses. Reapply for UTS after I get all my other stuff in order.

The good thing this round is that my Jobseeker Payment from the Australian Government (Centrelink) no longer relies on 0.75 units of full-time study. With that untethered I have some more flexibility.

The only reason I can get these thoughts onto paper is because my medication is at the lowest levels in my system, which means my brain has minimal scrambling. Cognitive function will decline when I have my morning dose in a few hours.

And then the question has to be asked do I even want to do my course? Should I go for a more generalised science like I wanted to some 20 years ago. I loved biomedical research right up until they started trying to shove careers down my throat and threatened my future work with needing to be competitive with grants to guarantee another year of work.

That’s just not me. I really think I need to fight the government a little bit harder on the Disability Support Pension. While being a JobSeeker with the Disability Employment Service is amazing… DSP would give me more flexibility to do what I want.

After all, what is the point of living if you can’t do what you want to do? I never asked to be here and I’m happy to leave. But the government refuses to give me a way out. This is not peak humanity so I can only do the best I can. For now that seems to be dropping a bunch of subjects, keeping one and focusing on getting the DSP.

My next psychiatrist appointment should have a breakthrough or two with specialised therapy, but more on that in a later post. I just hope it works because I need to deal with this childhood trauma (read: sexual assault of a minor). It’s been hanging over my head for the past 30 years and it nearly drove me to kill myself. Sunnier days ahead perhaps.

In other news, I’ve downsized my study TV (and sold my PlayStation 5 to fund it), the wasp comb nest I’ve been watching has three overwintered native wasps, and I’ve started to stress eat, which combined with pregabalin has caused roughly a 5% weight increase

I’m also trying to detangle some of my life from the Apple ecosystem (I’m looking at you Siri) with a Beelink NUC running Ubuntu - so far so good.

We held a successful BBQ party with an appearance from Nick, I was very glad he could make it. Sadly Lilly had a viral infection but that’s OK!

Jon made it as a regular which was great too!

I guess I technically started UTS for the spring period and am still finding bees on the path out front of a (cold) morning. Spring will be here soon and I can’t wait. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Too bad my planning is out the window thanks to pregabalin. Oh well, what’s a girl to do! 🤷‍♀️

And we return to the modems. From cicadas to real life issues and back to modems. This one is actually a bit of a fun video as I get to ramble on for around 30 minutes. Is it all about the modem? Probably not. Will you watch the entire video? If you do I’ll be very surprised!

This dial testing video is a follow up to the two overview videos here, which include some of the specs and other details relevant to the modem. There’s plenty more to come, so stay tuned as always and thank you for joining me on this journey of chaos (and modems)! 😅

Orientation week has started at university. The only thing I’ve seen so far were queues. Although, I did get to direct two people to the great hall. That wasn’t terrifying. So why the hell can’t I deal with groups?

Let’s look at the medications I am on. Bupropion is gone now. It killed my emotional range. After being off it for a few days I can cry again. Which is great. It also caused me to get crazy hungry, I would just attack all the snacks - perhaps it was stress eating, perhaps it was a combination of the two.

We’ve got lorazepam 2.5 mg, a benzodiazepine, which I’ve been splitting in half and taking a few hours apart to have a greater effect over a longer period of time. And only taking as needed - very important. However, it just doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Today I added half a propranolol, 5 mg, as 10 mg was making me far too fatigued. A casual walk up and down stairs should not make a person sweat violently.

Unfortunately, after today I can confidently say that this combination is not helping. And I hate to say this knowing what it puts me through every time, but I am going to bring pregabalin back into the fold.

I’ll discuss this further with my psychiatrist later this week at length. I’m honestly having issues seeing any other solutions apart from the sweet release of death.

In hindsight, looking back at my past performance at university, I have only been successful if I have a support person with me. How can I make that happen? My capacity is limited when it comes to dealing with unknown people and even more so unknown groups.

So we’ll use pregabalin, maybe along with the lorazepam and see how much memory loss I end up with. It should remove my social limiters at least.

Way back in 2021 when I was attending UNSW while working… I was on something around 300 mg pregabalin per day. The one course I did, I scored a High Distinction (97). I can’t remember anything about it, but I did well. So yeah, memory might break. Ughhh!

I suppose in an absolute worst case, I end up dropping the course and deferring until early 2025 and try again. Who knows maybe things will be more stable by then. A girl can dream about having a decent income via disability support pension (DSP) or maybe just escaping this living hell we call life. 🤷‍♀️

Ahhhhh yes, now where was I? I’ve corrected my spiralling debt thanks to an early release of superannuation due to financial hardship. Taking away from future me isn’t too bad - especially as future me shouldn’t really exist. The fact that present day me exists is surprising to… me. For now I’m past that.

I’ve hit a bit of a problem with the ever-fast-approaching start of university. I can’t handle groups of people. Groups of people I don’t know anyway.

I have trialled visiting a gender therapy group repeatedly and either break down and fail to leave or get to the group, enter the building and… panic. I then escape the situation. Fear extinction will be difficult to achieve - especially in such a short time before university starts.

Doing nothing now will likely result in me deferring until 2025. In an effort to mitigate this I tried to restart antidepressants. I picked out the least side effect riddled one. In my case, that would be duloxetine (Cymbalta), an SNRI.

And no. I can’t even. Unrelenting bruxism 24/7. At the lowest dose. Every damn time. Something is not quite right with my serotonin-based systems. Great. That’s why I’ve had no luck with antidepressants or first-line anxiolytics for the past decade. So where to from here?

My anxiety seems to fuel my depression and seems to be specific to interacting with groups of people. Of course there are the drugs that no one wants to prescribe because they are bad for you. Mainly drugs in the barbiturate and benzodiazepine-classes. I would argue that killing myself is also bad for me. I would rather feel better some of the time than none of the time. They are not available to me, so…

I’m trialing buproprion (Zyban, Wellbutrin) which is an NDRI. No bruxism. Doesn’t touch serotonin and might be good for moderate anxious depression. There’s a honeymoon period of two weeks where everything feels magical - as it is pretty much a stimulant. Now I wait for the down-regulation of receptors to see if it has any lasting effect.

In other news I’ve scraped the top end of the healthy BMI range. BMI isn’t the absolute best measure but it does tell me that I am healthier at a BMI of 24.8 than a BMI of 34.8. I’ll probably start to cycle my weight around to see if any fat redistribution happens.

What an excellent segue into the medication side of things for being a transgender woman. I’ve been monitoring a few things over the past month or so.

Progesterone is expensive and I am poor. So I have been trying to see how equivalent the compounded version of progesterone is to Prometrium (progesterone with an oil-based carrier, expensive). And at 400 mg/day split twice a day and measured in the trough, I ended up with slightly better numbers on paper using compounded.

However, there is one unexpected, positive side effect that I appreciate. When taking the oil-based Prometrium (200 mg with food), I get a nice little high. A similar feeling to 4-5 mg of diazepam. I was not getting this when I was on finasteride. My best guess is that the finasteride was interfering with metabolism to the several neurosteroids - allopregnanolone and friends.

For a few hours each day, at a big hit to my wallet, I can leave my anxiety behind and actually get things done. It’s a very desirable side effect for me. For now I am not taking any progesterone to retest my baseline - it should be very low but not quite zero.

One of the reasons for retesting my baseline is a pretty big confounding factor - I am now on modified release (or sustained release) compounded progesterone which could have messed with testing. To try and counter this over a one week period I increased my dose to 800 mg/day. Nothing. No positive mental side effects at all. No negative ones either.

I’m also checking serum DHT, which isn’t very useful as most of the testosterone to DHT conversion is done intracellularly at the target site - the hair follicle. I suppose I’m looking for shifts of various precursor hormones when on progesterone vs when not on progesterone. I’ll do another post when I have additional data.

It was also neat to see what my estradiol levels were so soon after a new set of pellets were implanted. I scored just over 1500 pmol/L around one week after implant. This was ~700 pmol/L with the existing pellets prior to the newest set. After another three weeks, it was round 1200 pmol/L. Anything above 400 pmol/L is just gravy.

See what the bupropion made me do? This post is massive. Oh well, until next time! 🥰

Let me preface this by saying it has been a very long month. I have been experiencing bits of euphoria here and there - when they hit, it makes me grateful I didn’t kill myself as planned. The CAPTCHA below was one of those moments. This post is just a quick life update with some pretty photos. I haven’t forgotten about my most recent blood tests - I’ll get to them in a future post. For now, let’s look at where I am at in life! 🦂

My transgender journey continues. I’d be lying if I said I was on top of this. There’s just so much that I need to work on. I’m trying to prioritise what I consider to be the most important tasks. My name change is mostly complete now. I am loving my new name. Phoenix. The nicknames it can give are just amazing. Pho, Hoe, Enix, Nix, Nixie. It’s the perfect name as far as I’m concerned.

Gender marker changes, i.e. male to female, are proving a bit more difficult thanks to the NSW state government lagging the most when it comes to transgender legislation in Australia. I mean even Queensland is ahead of us… yes, the one with all the crocodiles.

I am still in therapy, which is going well. Does anyone ever really leave therapy? Not really. It’s providing me insight into subtle gender dysphoria signs I had never truly realised. Coupled with a little bit of pregabalin (Lyrica) I have made some affirming breakthroughs, cracking open some repressed memories.

And I’m pretty sure that in hindsight, having a desire to take your girlfriend’s birth control pills is not a very cisgender thought. If only I had known more about transgender people while growing up. Things would have been a bit different. I just thought I might have been gay for a bit. Well turns out that wasn’t quite right. I mean I am definitely gay now, but as a transgender woman.

Weight loss is continuing to march in the right direction. Meals have been cut back to two a day, one at 11 am and one at 5 pm. This seems to work well so far. Looking at the image above, the shaded areas are times when I was under the weight I am now. Some rough pixel maths says one year is 510 px.

In the 2016-2017 range, I was at or below my current weight for around 14 months. Between 2020-2022 I was at or below my current weight for 25 months. That’s around three years of being less weight than I am now since data collection started way back in 2008, pretty neat!

Losing weight while transitioning might not be the best idea, the two just happened to begin at the same time. I guess one is a reason to live as my true self and the other makes the still alive me a healthier person. It’s interesting to see how the rate of weight loss has slowed compared to previous periods. Not sure if this is estradiol messing with my metabolism or maybe just because I keep eating pretzels and cupcakes…

That’s not to say that being healthier and baking bread and cake goods are incompatible. At the moment I’m almost reverse-engineering the pretzels into regular wholemeal bread. To think, I was just trying to make it an easier (or lazier) recipe. Don’t worry once they are ready I’ll be sure to add them to the recipes page. Most of the recipes will be vegan. Eggs or dairy milk are no longer welcome. I’m back on the path to being as vegan as I can… bee.

A positive side effect of being vegan means I have to stop eating bees. This means instead of eating them, I can get better at handling them. Flow-on effects include helping me gain a new respect for the local paper wasps. It’s almost winter here so the queens are asleep. The European honey bees on the other hand are still out and about. They seem to enter torpor and power down overnight if they get stuck away from their hives. Sometimes they will warm up when popped in the sun and take flight.

Not all is well though, the most common form of failure I have seen so far is what looks like pesticide poisoning. All legs spasm, then work fine for a bit, then spasm again. To prevent suffering, these little ones are mechanically destroyed. It hurts. Every. Single. Time.

Another one I found seems to have had issues with the two front legs. Poor thing couldn’t clean itself. A little bit of digging and… the slow bee paralysis virus (SBPV) appeared. Look at that vector, Varroa destructor mite. And it looks like the government has given up. Interestingly, it does not affect the native bees.

On the employment and study front, I do not miss trading my time for pay that has very little benefit. The balance sheet is broken. Too many cons, too few (if any) pros. The benefit is just not there anymore. My life goals have shifted and I can leave any time I want.

With that in mind, I guess I’ll head back to university for the 18th time. I’ve literally picked a degree based on a dream I had. Quite a euphoric dream too, I saw my future self (in the third person) doing work in bushland. Regeneration? Documenting life as it existed during the Holocene (or Anthropocene) extinction event? Who knows. All I do know is that I’m just biding my time for now. What does the future hold? Who knows! What is a girl to do? 🤷‍♀️

Footnote: I picked up some fully hectic debt. And now I’m trying to kick pregabalin again. Incredible how fast physiological dependence happens. I can rest, errr-somewhat-uneasily-thanks-to-pregabalin-withdrawal-induced-insomnia, knowing that the psychiatrist who prescribed them for sleep is now retired. I think I’ll be ready for mid-year intake at uni in… late July. I best do some exposure therapy at the uni before my first day there… bring it on! 🦎

In the past week I have decreased my dose of progesterone to 100 mg twice daily (200 mg total). I have not had one incident of my brain feeling like it was on fire. Additionally, I am now taking my dose two hours away from any food. Because pharmacokinetics.

There seemed to be conflicting information in the Consumer Medicines Information (CMI) leaflet I was provided for my compounded progesterone compared with the commercially available Prometrium.

Exhibit one, CMI for compounded progesterone. Delivered straight to my door from somewhere in Hinchinbrook, NSW.

Certain types of food may affect the way medicines work.

Exhibit two, CMI for commercially available progesterone (brand Prometrium).

Do not take Prometrium with food as this may affect the way Prometrium works.

I remember reading both of these when starting progesterone and thinking, those are not the same. But with most medications I’ve taken in the past taking with food smooths out the release of medication. But it turns out when taken with food oral progesterone doubles the peak concentration. Whoops?

What’s worse is that the metabolites of progesterone, such as allopregnanolone, can increase even further in a completely disproportionate fashion. Great! Throw in short half lives and you’re in for a treat.

Probably worth noting that allopregnanolone does interact with the glutamate system by reducing glutamate release. What happens when the allopregnanolone levels drop rapidly then? Brain fire. This may explain why it felt like excitotoxicity.

Realistically I need to consider an alternate route of administration to dodge all the neurosteroids. I guess I’ll have a word to my endocrinologist sometime in the near future. Stay tuned! 🙃

I touched on progesterone (P4) in my last transgender update post. I am not quite sure if progesterone is working in the way I want it to. My biggest annoyance with it is feeling like my brain is on fire just before trying to sleep.

Rewind to late February 2024, for almost three weeks my progesterone dose was doubled to 400 mg of oral, micronised, compounded progesterone - 200 mg twice a day. That’s up from the 200 mg once at night.

I had also ceased finasteride. And finasteride interferes with the progesterone (oral) pathway conversion to neurosteroids such as allopregnanolone. This is because finasteride blocks *most* of the activity (~70%) of the 5-alpha reductase (5AR) enzyme. In turn, reducing levels of allopregnanolone - or at least slowing their conversion to neurosteroids.

My sleep quality has been pretty broken for a while now. Look at those orange blocks. And here I was looking forward to some of the benefits from progesterone. Anxiolytic? Yes please! Sleep improving? Definitely!

Instead I get this whole brain fire thing and feel like I’ve taken an anxiogenic. That got me thinking, brain on fire? Throw in some formication and it’s what feels like a glutamate rebound or surge. Excitotoxicity perhaps?

I’ve experienced similar feelings while withdrawing from pregabalin (decreases glutamate levels) and trusty old diazepam (increases GABA levels). Definitely that same feeling though. It appears that taking what I would consider a small dose (2 mg) of diazepam negates the insomnia pretty well. Even though diazepam isn’t a terribly good choice for sleep. It takes me from being a wired insomniac to sleeping beauty in about an hour.

Another interesting side effect I am seeing a lot more of is dissociation. Ordinarily, I would only experience this while in high stress, high anxiety situations but recently I’m noting it a lot more just doing chores around the house - which is a little concerning.

Regardless, it seems that something is messing with my GABAergic system and metabolites of progesterone fit the bill. Armed with my two-thirds of a biomedical science degree I went digging for more information on the metabolites. Up above is an image from my last health blog post. Note the action of finasteride on progesterone - blocking allopregnanolone (THP) and isopregnanolone.

I wonder if moving to a more potent 5AR blocker, such as dutasteride, would reduce the side effects of a higher dose of progesterone? A question for my endocrinologist I suppose. I restarted my finasteride to at least partially block some of the following progesterone metabolites. Let’s look at the metabolites a little closer and how they act.

Allopregnanolone (Tetrahydroprogesterone or THP) Positive allosteric modulator 9 hours

Pregnanolone Positive allosteric modulator 1 - 3.5 hours

Isopregnanolone Negative allosteric modulator 14 hours Targets allopregnanolone only

Epipregnanolone Negative allosteric modulator Half-life unknown

Alright, so a bunch of neurosteroids are doing a bunch of things. A few are being blocked, but also produce negative side effects when they weren’t blocked. Hormones are messy. Where does that leave me? I guess I am left questioning whether I should be taking progesterone at all. At minimum a dose reduction is definitely called for. I will probably return back to 200 mg and see what symptoms, if any, follow.

My search revealed some interesting data with overlap in symptoms shared with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in cisgender women.

PMDD is believed to be caused by fluctuations in gonadal sex hormones or variations in sensitivity to sex hormones.

If sensitivity to level shifts is reason for the negative side effects, then single or even twice daily doses are probably not enough to smooth out the levels of neurosteroids for me, allowing me enter a withdrawal state, perhaps? Brain on fire? This paper offers some great insight into the mechanisms behind it all with some interesting side notes on SSRIs.

Interestingly, SSRIs increase allopregnanolone levels in the brain, rapidly and at low doses, as demonstrated in rodents as well as in patients with depression.

Could this be one of the reasons why I can’t tolerate SSRI/SNRIs? At the very least, it’s some food for thought. Worth noting that the original study has been questioned a little further along in the paper. Let’s circle back to those progesterone levels again. From Wikipedia

Progesterone levels tend to be less than 2 ng/mL prior to ovulation and greater than 5 ng/mL after ovulation.

What were my most recent levels again? 9.1 nmol/L or should I say 2.6 ng/mL (freedom units). That’s at 200 mg once daily at night, measured in the trough. I really need to ask myself, do I want to have symptoms of PMS/PMDD? Is that even a question that needs to be asked?

Looking at the levels on Table 1 in this paper give an idea where my levels line up. If you factor in the short half-life of most of the metabolites, once daily dosing is probably a bad idea. Ideally, I should look into getting the dose split to 100 mg twice daily.

Of course I have to be mindful of negative risk such as the androgen backdoor pathway. This has the potential to generate unwanted androgens like DHT - which will affect the hair on my head. That’s why the finasteride is here to stay until most means of testosterone generation is removed from my system…

It’s not all bad though. Finasteride competes with progesterone for the 5AR enzyme - which results in even less 5AR being available for testosterone -> DHT conversion. Another point worth considering is that progesterone has a positive effect on bone-building cells (osteoblasts). This can help with avoiding or reducing effects of osteoporosis.

Touching on side effects I’ve noticed, Progesterone should increase libido. Which is something I do not want due to past trauma. However, I wonder if the finasteride side effects are at play here. Again, I don’t consider them negative side effects either.

Other oddities I’ve also noticed my facial hair has become darker at the higher progesterone dosing at 400 mg. My upper lip now has dark black hairs, that’s new and unwanted. It might be useful for IPL treatment. But now there’s shadow on my upper lip I never had before. It isn’t just the thinning of skin either. The hairs are black instead of blonde.

One big uncertainty is that I’m not sure what my levels of estradiol will be at the next blood test. Are the 200 mg of pellets doing their job properly? Or did they fail? Does the dose need to be increased?

For now, I’ve been supplementing the implant with the remainder of my 2 mg estradiol pills while the pellets stabilise. One pill gives me ~85 pmol/L in estradiol levels. I’ve only just ran out of those so now I’m adding in some of the estradiol gel (Sandrena branded). These gave ~200 pmol/L estradiol per dose according to my most recent blood tests. In theory with one a day, I should be guaranteed to be in the late follicular phase - regardless of the implant levels.

Anyway, that was one heck of an info dump. I think that sums everything up that has been on my mind lately.

TL;DR 400 mg oral progesterone makes my brain go on fire. Progesterone metabolite levels shifting around are very activating for me. I will now target cisgender progesterone levels in the late follicular phase. Hormones are complicated. One size fits most seems to be at play when it comes to progesterone. Nothing like some trial and error! 🙃