#testosterone is unpredictable and most of all something that takes a lot of time

[nathanprscott]

more power to elliot for even being able to get this done but i hope to god no pre-transition transmen fall into the trap of believing transitioning will make them end up with male bone structure hips like that (or that six-pack, though it's not unachievable obviously if you train hard enough but being that skinny with a pack like that? unlikely.) no hate, just please remember this is done with celebrity cash, not testosterone.

[sunfish-studies]

Addition

✄・・・ Patterns [Haikyuu!! Military Police AU]

➜ Pairing: Oikawa x Reader | Iwaizumi x Reader | Kageyama x Reader | Hinata x Reader | Kuroo x Reader | Bokuto x Reader | Akaashi x Reader | Sawamura x Reader

➜ Warning: violence (sparring and missions), possible mentions of blood and bleeding, guns, knives, possible descriptive/mentions of injuries

➜ Notes: this short series is inspired by Gusari’s HQ 3rd Fanbook | you can assume everyone’s aged up | the reader is a female and the same age as the third years of HQ | this will be mostly platonic (bcs I suck at writing romance)

[Art by Gusari]

↷ SUMMARY ↶

Being acknowledged as one of the best in your division is an honor and led you to take a higher step towards being number one. Maybe after seeing your ambition and skill despite your gender, Mr. Irihata and Mr. Nekomata decided to moved you to the special squad.

“Wow, a new recruit!?”

“A girl!?”

Your first impression would be ‘too much testosterone in one room’–exactly as you describe in the sentence, only male population occupied the space whereas you’re the only female there was. Mr. Irihata and Mr. Nekomata deemed it would be a great time to introduce you to the squad you’ll be working with so here you were, standing near the door and trying so hard not to squirm on your toes.

Instantly, pairs of eyes focused on your figure once you stepped in their line of sight–surely, your appearance is similar to a sore thumb.

“Today, she will be working with you as a part of the team,” Mr. Irihata announced, gesturing his hand to you. “Introduce yourself, soldier.”

Automatically, you took a step forward and saluted with neutral gaze. “Otohaku [Name] from Miyagi’s Female Division, pleased to meet you.”

That’s how your adventure started.

You’ve known Oikawa, Iwaizumi, and Kageyama the longest. Oikawa and Iwaizumi have been your best friends ever since you three were still freshmen–often trained together, discussing about strategies, and many more other than just talking about work in general. You’re thankful for them because in your personal training, they didn’t pull their punches which resulting you have more strength than your peers.

Even after you’re being separated because of divisions, your friendship didn’t waver even for a bit.

When they found out, you’re joining the squad they were more delighted than any other. Oikawa cheered and immediately jumped onto you out of excitement, rubbing his cheek against yours as you patted his back. Iwaizumi threw an arm around you and grinned widely. It’s nice to finally work together with your boys. Most of the time, you spend your time with the two in the base or when you’re free.

Meanwhile, Kageyama is your junior. During his time as a freshman, you’re chosen to be his mentor and trying his best to guide him. He’s extremely talented, towering over his peers when it came to skill in sniping and gun wielding. However, he was second to none when socializing suddenly involved. You tried your best to help him getting used, coaxed him into simple conversations, inviting him to eat with you during lunch or dinner. Your kindness is like no other and that’s why Kageyama is attached to you.

After knowing you will be working together with him, happiness is an understatement. He congratulated you in a lot of stutters and stiffened once you pulled him into a hug. Although it’s only a few seconds before he completely melted into your warmth. Kageyama found himself constantly trailing over you and tried his best to be around you as often as possible–which you found cute.

Kuroo, Bokuto, and you were placed in the same team–the mobility team. The three of you have the highest score when it comes to movements, parkours, and close combat. Kuroo was a polite gentleman at first, but once you’re close with each other he turned into a menace–teasing you endlessly, poking your cheek just to annoy you, and many more.

Bokuto is a beaming ball of energy which seemed to never ran out. He was an outspoken person who doesn’t afraid to ask straightforwardly if something’s nagging his mind. You were the person he would go to if he wanted to hear praises because he knew you always give it to him. He didn’t hesitate to be touchy or clingy towards you–physical contact is something he loves and you always let him hug you whenever he wanted.

Being in the same team with the same field, you three practices together more often than any other. While Kuroo is an expert in hand-to-hand, Bokuto and you are intense in using your legs–especially you who learned gymnastics once, your flexibility is challenging for them because it makes your moves even more unpredictable.

Hinata is a ball of sunshine, bright and warm and always lightened up your day. He looked up to you because he himself is rather amateur, but with his amazing stamina and reflexes he became the part of the team. He often seeks directions and advises from you and you didn’t mind teaching him or having extra practice with him. Who were you to deny his eagerness? When he did a good job, you never forgot to award him with head pats, something he enjoyed the most.

Akaashi is a rather quiet person, which makes him your safe place. He lets you pour out whatever seemed to frustrated you in a private conversation shared between just the two of you–in return, you did the same for him, listening to what’s nagging him. You two comfort each other. Akaashi sometimes helped you in practicing your sniping skills, he’s a great teacher and you found yourself improved tremendously from his help. When Akaashi needs a relieve, he will go to you, sitting beside you and just drops his head on your shoulder–you will stroke his hair and he will calm down from the simple gesture.

Sawamura is your hard-working-and-overly-stressed captain. Your existence is a blessing to him because in between the menaces of the team deprived of logic and normality, you’re a fresh air. You listen, pay attention, and obeying his orders–something he forgot how it supposed to feel. In return, he tried his best to assist you in anyway possible. Engaging a conversation with him is easy–he’s extremely wise for his age, whenever you need advices or encouragements, he’s the one you will go to.

Despite being the only female there is, the team never once disrespects you. They set you in high regards, acknowledging your skills, including you in discussions–gender is already passed their mind. They treated you equally, could be seen when they never pulled out their punches when it came to sparring with you–they went all out every single time, the same for you.

They didn’t see you as someone who needs to be placed in the back–you’re never given a minor role in missions, all of them were given to you because they knew you’re capable. Not once they thought you’re fragile or need protection, you could defend yourself well.

Still, they had unspoken boundaries–averting their gaze when practice shirt clung to your figure and literally shaped it (Kuroo pointed out that your chest is huge and he received a painful smack on the head by Iwaizumi along with withering glares from the rest), draping a jacket or clothing over you so you could cover up, never burst into your room without permission, requesting to build a separate room and laundry room just for you to respect your privacy, and many more.

(They consumed respect women juice 25/8)

Safe to say, you weren’t complaining about anything in this team and living you’re life the fullest as a part of it.

[bearsfakedthemoonlanding]

Family Stuff

[CW: family turmoil, drug mention, alcohol mention, talk about what could go wrong when i come out, transphobia later on when I start talking about my dad]

I don’t know if my accidental gap year was beneficial or detrimental for all of this.  On one hand, it was absolute hell on my mental health.  A real bad year, for sure.  Lots of exhaustion and panicky feelings and drinking and the classic family “picking up the pieces after my grandmother loses her shit and my mom starts to fall apart” game.  Started taking anti-anxiety meds and relying on them pretty heavily (which isn’t by itself a bad thing, but as someone who has now shown he can function really damn well without them, a little concerning). 

Then again, I got really close to my parents.  Not in quick bursts, like I started to during college breaks when I returned home, but functionally.  For over a year we were living with each other and interacting on an adult level, not a high school level.  It was nice. 

My mom and I always had a pretty close relationship, besides the few month spat immediately after my coming out.  But the gap year really gave me the chance to get close to my dad again in a way I haven’t felt much since before puberty.

It was nice.  I grew much closer with my maternal grandparents (grandfather and step-grandmother, grandmother on that side is a wound that I’m not sure is ever going to scab over properly).  I got to know my little cousin, and felt less like an alien around my aunts and uncles on my father’s side.  Really started to feel like a grown up. 

I like the connections I made there.  I like feeling something a bit deeper than “well, we’re Related,” y’know?  I also earned myself a bit of merit by how I behaved while there.  I was working two jobs and keeping constantly busy, doing a lot of farm work for my dad.  I earned a good bit of respect for not being a bum. 

And now I’ve moved out, and almost immediately started transitioning.  I don’t know if the connections I made are strong enough to survive this.  Am I putting everything in jeopardy?  Obviously what matters here is personal happiness.  We live in an individualistic society, and I’m certain that these are the choices that feel most comfortable.  I won’t be uncomfortable for the sake of my family, not in regards to this.  This is mine.  In a perfect world, they’d support me. 

When I was a young gay teen and everything had started going to hell around me (myself included), and then further when I was a young gay adult in college far far away from my family, I was convinced there would be some Grand moment.  Some big blow up.  The Fight I’d been waiting for.  

My mother didn’t let me come out verbally to everyone.  She couldn’t really control what I did with my hair or clothes anymore, couldn’t curb my behavior when I only saw her three months out of the year.  But the fact that I was gone so much made it harder to do anything rash.  If I came home for Christmas, and I came out, and then I left, it wasn’t my problem to deal with.  It was hers.  I couldn’t do that to her. 

But homosexuality (or, as it would be, bisexuality), was something that could be tucked away.  I could date and explore and it could all be a careful little secret.  I figured the big blow would come when I married, when I invited my entire family and nobody showed.  I’ve been making peace with that.

But this.  This isn’t some secret.  There’s plausible deniability in a gender non-conforming kid who never brings home a boyfriend and acts a little off.  “She’s so quirky.”  You know. 

There’s no plausible deniability in a deepened voice and different shaped body and facial hair.  There’s no plausible deniability in becoming a man.  

Maybe it won’t be fast.  Maybe it won’t be immediate.  I was a late bloomer anyways, I don’t know what my testosterone timeline will look like.  But I know the changes are coming, and when I start looking the way I want, it’ll be strange to still use those words.  Niece. Daughter. Girl. My birthname can stay, I don’t mind, but she/her?  It’ll finally make everyone else as uncomfortable with it as I’ve felt for a long time. 

There’ll be no more plausible deniability. 

What will the extended family think?  Will they tut and be disturbed but polite (passive aggressive), or will they ban me outright?  “Don’t tell IT when family christmas is.” Motherfucker it’s on Christmas.  It’s always on Christmas, aunt Carol, what the fuck? 

More concerning, what will my father think?  

I think my mother and I will survive this.  It’ll hardly be the first time I’ve surprised and disturbed her.  I’m her only child, and I’ve always been a terrible handful. My entire childhood I was too emotional, too sensitive, I was constantly sick, I was rough-and-tumble and always in some sort of a cast for breaking something.  I was weird.  And then I was goth, and then I was gay, and my mother has eventually come to terms with all of this. 

She’ll either break down and, slowly, we’ll fix ourselves again, or she’ll have seen this coming.  Or both.  Or neither.  I think she’s as unpredictable as I am, actually. 

But my dad is loudly morally opposed to all of this.  I don’t know what he thinks Galatians 3:28 actually MEANS, but he’ll quote every other bible verse he can find (and everything his shitty, stupid pastor feeds him) before considering this might be something bigger.  Might be beyond the bible, or even allowed by it.  Might not be half-bad.  He thinks trans people shouldn’t get healthcare, thinks it shouldn’t be allowed.  Thinks it’s an american right to discriminate against us.  Thinks the bathroom thing is bullshit, thinks we’re asking for it. 

He also thinks we shouldn’t be attacked, shouldn’t be beaten or killed, but he’s always been more of an “all sins hold the same weight” sort of man.  He’s absolutely against it.  

I don’t know what I’ll do to make this all okay.  I like getting along with him.  I like bonding, and making him proud.  I spent the past year doing “boyish” activities with him.  I never let him take me hunting, sure, but we went shooting and we built shit, we put gates in the ground and hauled lumber and did electrical work and plumbing and we wrestled and threw hay and drank beer, 

and I’m so fucking scared that I won’t be able to do any of those things as his son, instead of his daughter.

Then again, I don’t anticipate living at home ever again.  I’ll visit, if they let me, but I’m on my own now.  Maybe it won’t matter.  Maybe i won’t ever stay long enough to notice those things are missing.  Maybe I should just be grateful for the year that I had, and let that be.  

There’s really no use fretting about it before it happens.  My transition will continue, and my family will respond however they choose, and I’ll be strong enough to deal with whatever the fallout may be.  We’ll get there. 

I am. Beyond grateful that I’m doing this as a young adult, and not a teenager, or an undergrad.  Wish I’d figured out my identity younger, wish there’d been less uncertainty, but I can’t imagine facing down these decisions at fifteen.  

To the kids who are figuring this out young, you are impossibly brave.  I’m inspired by you.  I look up to you.  I wasn’t that strong as a teen.  It’s sad that so many of you have to be strong like that. 

These are just thoughts for the day.  I’ll read this after I’ve told them the truth, see how many of my fears have blossomed or died.  Boyhood is weird, but not in a bad way.

Sorry dad.

[cassolotl]

Coming off testosterone

I stopped taking testosterone on day 235, May 19th 2019 - 6 days ago, and after just under 8 months of low-dose testosterone. I had 1 pump of Tostran gel per day, which the medication leaflet says is 10mg of testosterone.

~

WHY DID I START TAKING LOW-DOSE TESTOSTERONE?

I’m nonbinary, and my goal was always to be androgynous. I started taking testosterone to deepen my voice, mainly, but the idea of a more masculine fat distribution on my body was appealing because I also have dysphoria about my hips and slim shoulders. “Passing” as nonbinary isn’t really a thing because most people don’t know that there are more than two genders, so the best I could really hope to achieve realistically was to confuse as many people about my gender as possible. 😈

Changes I wanted:

Deeper voice

Genital changes

Less feminine body fat distribution

Changes I didn’t want:

Facial hair

Hairline changes (but if it happens a little that’s okay)

Loss of hair on head

Body hair

A couple of years ago I had one session of voice therapy (NHS), which was fun and very interesting, but it taught me a couple of things. One was that finding my lower pitches and getting that low resonance by finding my chest voice was definitely helpful and relieved my voice dysphoria. The other was that there was no way I was going to be able to keep up with multiple voice exercises per day to keep it that way. I pretty much decided that day that testosterone was the most sensible option, and even though it was scary I would just have to find a way to deal with the negative effects.

My voice dysphoria was sort of disconnected from my idea of my gender. All I really knew was that my voice needed to be a lower pitch and more resonant. I felt that dysphoria especially when I was talking excitedly or when I was singing. But I also knew that I didn’t want people to mistake me for a man either, and since it’s a very long slow process and quite unpredictable I knew that I would need to be careful to keep track of things to make sure I didn’t start giving myself a new kind of gender dysphoria in the masculine direction!

It was another year or two before the stars aligned and I actually managed to get the can of Tostran into my hands (NHS).

~

HOW DID IT GO?

As I mentioned above, I was on a low dose, one pump of Tostran per day. One can lasted about 107 days. The endocrine nurse said I could reduce the dose to half if I squirted the gel onto my leg/stomach as usual and then wiped half the gel-dribble off with tissue and threw it in the bin before I rubbed it in, but I never did that. The two-month blood test put my levels at 9.7 nmol or something like that. (Female range is 3 or below, and male range is 10 or above, so I was very nearly almost at the male range.)

The first month I got that scratchy throat feeling, which I now know happens when my voice is deepening, and I noticed my voice getting a little lower. Also I was SO GREASY OH MY GOD, I had to shower twice as much, I had to get some high-powered anti-perspirant deodorant. It didn’t make me spotty, it was just disgusting! But it felt okay because I could tell it was affecting my voice. I also noticed that I smelled different, and that my bedroom acquired that delightful(??) teenage boy smell! Ew. This kicked in properly in under a week, and trailed off around month two, though I still needed to take more showers and wear hardcore deodorant and I was still more greasy for the entire time I was on T.

On day 26 I noticed that my... [flails around wildly for non-dysphoric word] pudendum had gotten a little bigger, and I regret not getting “before T” photos. The growth was fast and a lot more noticeable than I had expected, and it was extremely emotionally intense, because I hadn’t realised but I’d been sort of suppressing and dissociating from genital dysphoria for my whole life. I knew I had genital dysphoria, but not how much or how it was affecting me. I was completely unprepared, and it was overwhelming. (I am very lucky that I was able to access fortnightly gender-specialist talking therapy at Charing Cross GIC during this time.) A few weeks later I started looking into genital surgery options. I think my genitals haven’t changed much in the last 2 months, so I guess it took about 5-6 months to get to where they are now.

Here’s the graph the Voice Pitch Analyzer app [iOS/Android] makes:

And here’s the graph I made myself using data from the app:

In the second graph, the thing I notice right away is that my highest pitch now is lower than my lowest pitch pre-T.

My first month was rapid pitch drop, and then there were a couple of months of wibbling around on a plateau, and then after that things kicked off again, I had a few scattered days of scratchy throat and things started meandering downward. A common pattern was two to four weeks of wild fluctuation and no drop, followed by a sudden drop over a day or two. Sometimes my brain took a while to adjust to a drop in pitch, and I would tire myself out speaking with a higher pitch than my vocal chords really wanted to do.

In the last couple of months I got a lot worse at making the voice recordings, which in hindsight might be because I was less enamoured with being on testosterone, and it was maybe a sign that my testosterone advantages were sort of wrapping up and it was nearly time to stop.

No one who sees me regularly said unprompted that they could hear a difference in my voice. When I asked people if my voice sounded different, they said “ehhh, maybe kinda, yeah?” I learned that testosterone doesn’t make your voice sound different! It makes it feel different, to yourself and to other people. My therapist, who I see (approximately) fortnightly, said she couldn’t tell the difference at all, and when I played her my day 1 voice recording to compare it to my current voice (6 months or so) she was like 😮.

Strangers are still mostly gendering me female, as far as I can tell, but my appearance and my voice means that strangers gender me male a little more often than pre-T. I also get “sir, I mean ma’am, gosh I’m so sorry...” more often. It makes me uncomfortable to make people uncomfortable, so I just usually say “it’s okay, I’m nonbinary so I’m kind of both??”, which rarely makes them less flustered or less confused. I had some cards made years ago that have the nonbinary flag on one side and the definition of nonbinary on the other, which I should just start handing out whenever this happens!

My testosterone dose was too low to stop my menstrual cycle, but it did seem to mellow out the highs and lows. My PMS and menstrual symptoms are generally a nightmare even though I have no uterus to bleed from, so that was a nice relief. It was very strange to experience PMS and boy puberty simultaneously.

I kept records of my specific dysphoria feelings from about 3.5 months, thanks to prompting from my gender-specialist therapist at Charing Cross GIC in London:

The ideal outcome, which I was looking out for, was all of the lines meandering towards that horizontal line in the middle. That would mean the feminine dysphoria was reducing and the masculine dysphoria was reducing.

I am pretty lucky, in that most of the changes I wanted from testosterone are permanent and the changes I didn’t want are temporary or reversible. I made some lines on the graph more bold because those were the ones that I wanted to keep an eye on. Here are my thoughts on this graph:

Facial hair was impossible to score because it gave me both masculine and feminine dysphoria. Feminine because those dark fine hairs on my upper lip are most often seen on cis women, and masculine because they were caused by testosterone and male puberty.

When my pudendum started growing it also gave mixed signals. It was good because it was getting bigger, but as it grew it highlighted that there was a lot going on down there that made me feel feminine dysphoria (mainly labia around my pudendum, and sometimes that it was still relatively small).

I am not a very hairy person. I thought I wouldn’t like having more body hair, and for a few months when I scored my dysphoria I focused on specific patches of new hair and thought about whether I was dysphoric and thought that I wasn’t. After a few months I realised I was being too short-sighted. Yes, I can totally deal with these new fine hairs on my thighs. Yes, this darker and thicker hair on my shins is okay. Sure, these hairs around my belly button are no big thing. But when I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, and saw the hair as a pattern, my whole brain recoiled. Yes, I am definitely dysphoric about masculine patterns of body hair on myself. :S

There was a trend of all types of dysphoria getting less over time - until month 7, when they all started getting worse except voice. It took a while to be sure it was a trend, but looking back on it, that was definitely a thing!

The ideal outcome would be all of those lines converging on the middle horizontal axis, and it hasn’t happened. There are no flawless solutions for nonbinary people at the moment. As things stand and with what’s available to me right now, I will probably always have gender dysphoria. But I’m pretty glad that I’ve done what I can and I will keep doing what I can, because it is all helping.

Unrelated to any gender stuff, I have put on weight and gone up a size or two in trousers and one size in t-shirts. It could just be that I’m in my 30s and my metabolism is slowing, which is what I assumed it was at first, but the weight has come on in quite a short space of time, so that made me think about what I’ve been eating and why. I noticed that I was craving carbs and sugar, eating it, and then feeling unsatisfied afterwards. The type of hunger I’ve been feeling lately feels the same as the type of hunger I had when I had Implanon, a three-year birth control implant. When I had that removed my appetite went back to normal. So this putting on weight feels a lot like a hormonal thing. I have mixed feelings about it! I strongly dislike my clothes feeling wrong and having to buy new clothes, but also bits of me are pleasingly wibbly and it’s fun to be able to rest my cup of tea on my stomach when I slouch. :D

Also unrelated to gender stuff, even on a low dose many of my EDS symptoms were noticeably reduced: fatigue, loose joints, joint pain, IBS, dysautonomia. (Joint pain and fatigue were still present, but not as bad after exertion.) I also noticed that the really vivid dreams and very emotional days that come with PMS mostly disappeared, which I was sad about.

~

HOW DID I KNOW TO STOP?

People gendering me in different ways has increased lately. Like, a few weeks ago me and @watchkeyphone were trundling about town, and one charity/religion street-hawker person asked if we were sisters, and then a hundred yards later their colleague called us “lads” or something.

A week or so ago, I realised that my voice was sounding and feeling resonant in my chest pretty much all the time and that felt pretty nice, but I was still scoring my voice as sounding feminine, and I wondered if that might be because the changes are so gradual that I just changed my idea of what feminine sounds like. I noticed that I was more comfortable recording my voice to put online for various reasons.

I don’t live in a culture where people go around saying “excuse me sir” or “hello madam”, we don’t routinely gender each other in a formal way. But also, either I don’t have enough casual contact with strangers to notice gendered familiar words like “mate” or “love”, or strangers just avoid using those kinds of words with me because I’m hella queer-looking. So I basically realised that I have no idea how strangers see me or hear my voice at all.

So, in approximately this order:

I put a recording of my voice on the internet and asked strangers to gender my voice. Most of them said androgynous, leaning a little masculine. One person said I sounded like Q, a computer-generated intentionally genderless voice!

I went to a queer social group, and when it came up in conversation naturally I complained about how hard it is to know when to stop testosterone because I can’t tell how my body and voice are gendered by other people, and a lot of people I see regularly still see me the same way as they saw me pre-T. A couple of people said, “actually, in the past couple of months I have really noticed the effects...” So that was reassuring!

I decided to notice how my pitch works in different situations compared to pre-T. After the queer social group we went down to the river and some people swam, and when they got into the water and it was very cold, some of us cheered supportively - and I tried to woo like the “woo girls”, and my voice just came out at a dude pitch instead...! I apparently can’t be high-pitched at high volumes any more.

I watched a video about gender and voice by someone I’ve met in person. When I met them I noticed that their voice was pretty androgynous, and I enjoyed it and thought about how nice it must be to have a voice that can’t be easily gendered by strangers. When I watched this video last week, in which their voice was exactly the same, I noticed that they sounded like me. That was the moment that I realised my voice was done!

I spoke to my PA about it. I played my pre-T voice to her and her face was A Picture, she could not even. She then said that she has quite a feminine voice, and she suggested we each make a recording of our voices reading a paragraph of the book on the table, and then compare to her partner’s voice in a recording. My voice sounded more like her male partner’s voice than like hers.

I can now speak with a comically low deep resonant voice if I want to, and I can also speak with a high cutesy voice in order to address my cat, provided I am warmed up a bit.

~

HOW DID STOPPING GO?

On the day that I posted the voice file online, when strangers started saying I sounded masculine, I was honestly pretty surprised. In my head strangers in person were still mostly gendering me female, but when I really thought about it people hadn’t actually been gendering me much at all. I think I had been assuming strangers were hearing a woman’s voice because the change had been so gradual that I hadn’t had a moment where I could “update” my own gendering of my voice. I didn’t wake up one day and go “wow I sound like a dude” or whatever, so there was just nothing to update.

So, as soon as there was an indication that I might sound like a man soon, my gut said “NOPE” and I worried a little bit about going too far in the masc direction. If I keep taking T then I will sound more masculine and I might regret it, but if I stop and find that my voice dysphoria could be relieved with a little more testosterone I can start again in a few months, right? So I decided to not take it that day unless I learned/felt something that indicated I should put the gel on, and... I didn’t.

The first couple of days were pretty uneventful. Around day 4 I started to feel really run-down and chronic joint pain from EDS was flaring up, so I cancelled near-future plans. Yesterday was like the worst of my (uterusless) periods, I was in a lot of abdominal and lower back pain and then last night I slept for 11 hours... And today, also typical of my uterusless periods, it feels like a storm has blown over and I feel like a new human.

So what I’ve concluded is, coming off T triggered a very, very bad period.

Also, the past couple of days I have once again been SO GREASY, and I got spots yesterday, which is unusual in itself, but these are striking because they are WEIRDLY HUGE?? One of them is on my jaw and has caused a very noticeable swelling, so I’ve named it Balthazar.

(From “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” S03E12: Nine Days.)

~

WHAT NEXT?

It’s only been a week, so I’m assuming more weirdness is coming, but it’s all going to be ovary-hormone-related silliness so I’m pretty much used to it and I’m not too worried.

I am sad that I will probably slip back towards feminine body fat distribution. I will probably lose some of the weight that testosterone brought with it, but the remaining weight will probably end up on my hips again. I am really not looking forward to dissociating my hips again but I don’t know what I can do about it except have liposuction every few years?! (I will not do that.)

I am also sad that the bad bits of my menstrual cycle will go back to Full Force, and that my EDS symptoms will worsen again.

I am very much looking forward to my body hair getting finer and lighter, and maybe my upper lip hair will fade a bit too. If not I will probably have to get it painfully removed.

I want a metoidioplasty. Unlike many trans guys, I want no testicular prostheses, no vaginectomy, no phalloplasty, no new urethra. The clinicians at Charing Cross are aware that I want to have a metoidioplasty, because I included it in a letter when I wrote to the endo about a blood test, to make sure my surgery needs are documented in my medical records from the earliest date possible. I did that because they have minimum-time requirements for a bunch of diagnoses and referrals (like, two appointments before hormone treatment recommendation), which you can sometimes get around by providing reasonable counter-arguments. One of their requirements for referring for genital surgery is being on testosterone for at least a year where clinically indicated, so since testosterone has done its job now that means I’m not clinically indicated for testosterone any more, and I’m hoping that being on T for only 8 months shouldn’t be an issue. I also found a blog by a trans guy who had a simple metoidioplasty like the one I want, and his blog posts are really helpful and informative and have good quality non-porn photos (so rare omg), and his junk and my junk are extremely similar in size and appearance. (Here are his before and after pics.) So, fingers crossed the docs will consider that I have been on T for long enough and my pudendum is developed enough that surgery is an option.

I’ve written to the endocrinologist to say that I’ve stopped putting on the Tostran gel, and to ask if I still need to have those blood tests I’m meant to be having. I’m due to see him on 1st July anyway, a little over a month from now, and no doubt I will have saved up a list of questions for him!

~

CONCLUSION

Testosterone works.

[ohleander]

2.9.23

Ive been in freeze mode for a couple of days and it kinda has me a bit shook. I'm still trying to learn to keep myself and body calm but my hormones definitely feel more out of control than I'd like. A little over a year ago I thought to myself that taking testosterone might be a good option for me but I also wanted to understand my body and my baseline better before I made changes to it.. I try to respect and understand my body for what it is, but sometimes I do want to change things. I often find myself feeling the best when I have more testosterone in my cycle and less so during the other parts of my cycle. The other parts are where I feel absolutely out of my mind and I cant take it, I've read where a lot of people who start taking T feel better and more "normal" and I wonder if that would be true for me. I'm kinda interested in a low-dose to start with. I also often feel sooo disconnected from my physical body, though I try to have respect for it as well. I wonder if I'll ever get to feeling okay with myself. I still crave so much external validation. Still learning to give it to myself. Learning to not give everything I have to others has been intense. Keeping things for myself is certainly a practice.. But here I find myself holding onto so much that I either don't want or don't even realize. I still find myself shaming myself over certain things. Its silly and I'd like to keep letting go. I'll most likely always feel a bit unsure. I'll most likely always feel a bit uncomfortable. Is that my baseline? I really want so much more for myself but why don't I feel like I deserve to go after it? Why do I feel like me taking up space will take space away from others? Why do I think making room for others instead of myself is more valid? Isn't there room for us all? That's a mindset thing I'd like to change.

I don't know why all of this serious self reflection always flows right out of me. I'd like to write about other things sometime but things just don't flow so easily like they do when I think of this serious stream of consciousness stuff.

Right now I really am just kinda taking it one day at a time.. I can only do so much.. and as always I feel like I'm bracing for something big that's coming next. Its hard for me to feel okay when I feel like I cant keep up with the modern world and it makes me not even want to try. I've still got to find another way. Another way that's more effortless.

Also these days I'm feeling more clueless.. I reckon thats fine. I'm really looking to simplify my mind.. I thought it was my duty to be the wise wizard type, the nurturer but lawd.. the minute I try, it feels like something I dont want to do. I think its my self destructive tendencies.. why actually succeed and risk being a hated fool when you can self sabotage and stay ~ in control~ of your vibe, amiright? I also fear that when I'm not paying attention others will point out something I didnt see and I'll feel so dumb.. and maybe thats okay.. I fear my boss coming in and telling me I'm not doing enough.. I fear the unpredictable rejection.. unpredictable rejection is a tender core wound of mine..

I find myself faced with learning all the things I did not get during my formative times.. learning all the things and ways in which I fell short and was fallen short.. its easy to blame the parents and the way you were raised.. nurture and nature are both important. I'm still coming to understand my nature. I wish I could see myself as a valid person who can be seen in this world but I just want to nestle back and be as opposite from the vibe as possible. Modern life has you feelin guilty over NOT sharing your life.. I dont have anything to hide, I just dont really want to be SEEN so much.. just by the right people.

I'm allowed to dream big and I'm allowed to be absolutely grand and silly with it. I believe I am worthy of my biggest dreams and dreaming big is not selfish nor does it take anything away from anyone else.

LA

[ecocore]

Open Source Gendercodes

Ryan Hammond is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose current work, “Open Source Gendercodes,” focuses on the interplay between gender variation and technoscience. By developing novel sex hormone production technologies, OSG attempts to queer current regimes of ownership and biopower.

Ryan and Lee Pivnik discussed OSG, and where the work is at currently for ECOCORE - The Queer Issue.

_______________________________________________________________________

LP: I think it’s important to start with some detailed explanations. I don’t think I’m alone in regrettably feeling ignorant towards the histories of production for most products I consume, and when it comes to hormone production, I never even considered how something like Estrogen makes it from the lab to the individual. Could you explain how hormones are currently being produced, and how your project works to disrupt and democratize that?

RH: In human bodies, all steroid hormones including estrogens (estradiol, estrone, etc.) and androgens (testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, etc.) are produced from cholesterol. Cholesterol is the “substrate” that’s transformed through a series of enzymatically catalyzed chemical reactions to make pregnenolone > progesterone > androstenedione > testosterone > estrone > estradiol. Pharmaceutical steroid hormones are currently produced through multistage fermentation processes, sometimes combined with chemical synthesis steps. Often animal fats, or soybean oil and other plant oils containing phytosterols are used as substrates for microbes that enzymatically transform them. The development of these production technologies from the late 1800’s up to the present is entangled with power structures and ideological frameworks that co-create bodies, subjectivities, and genders. Efforts to eliminate queer, gender non-conforming, non-reproductive behaviors - as well as increase heterosexual prowess and enable lifelong performance of sanctioned masculinities and femininities drove the development of these technologies. Geopolitical forces, state enforced frameworks for the ownership of organisms and biomolecules, colonially imposed and medically enforced binary frameworks of sex and gender, population control and reproductive regimes have sculpted and co-created what we commonly refer to as “male and female sex hormones.” This is what’s most interesting to me, to collage and patch together an image of molecular technologies of gender as hyperobjects that I’m inescapably tangled in, and then involving myself in the parts that are least visible or accessible to me.

Initially I had hoped to help create a way for people to cheaply produce their own sex hormones and form coops for distributed control and production of drugs. While this is technically feasible with current production technologies and emerging Synthetic Biology techniques (the US military is currently funding several initiatives to produce on demand pharmaceuticals in combat zones in briefcase-refrigerator sized bioproduction units) -- the prospect of an affordable device that could produce hormones in transgenic yeast or plants, and additionally perform extraction, purification, and dosage in a safe way is far in the future.

Using SynBio to develop technologies for, cheap, democratized bioproduction is not an interesting research pathway to pharmaceutical companies because this does not grow profits and consolidate power. If we are going to imagine the “radical potential” of these types of technologies to create alternative futures, we have to find alternative ways to drive research in those directions. This is a special time for synthetic biology as it emerges: regulatory frameworks in the U.S. have yet to constrain the use of gene editing technologies, and the tools of the trade are becoming more accessible and affordable. In the popular imaginings that headline the pop discourse of these technologies, they have the capability to create utopian societies of ecologically synchronous abundance and guilt free consumption, or produce apocalyptic deserts at the whims of basement bioterrorists or unwitting experimenters. Most realistically, these technologies have great potential to calcify and reinforce the current imbalances of power and privilege.

Thinking on a smaller scale, outside of this utopian ideal of democratized bioproduction technologies: development of new, cheaper production methods - and their dedication to the public domain, could enable smaller generics companies to enter the market, drive down prices, and increase availability. This is the logic of the team working on the Open Source Insulin project at Counter Culture Labs as well. Creating “open source” drug production protocols is an act of biotechnical disobedience aimed at interrupting the cycle of patenting and legal monopolies that enable price jacking and profiteering in the health industry.

Additionally, could you briefly explain why tobacco plants work best for this?

I’m not necessarily interested in the tobacco plant itself, but in plants in general. It’s been shown that plant based bioproduction systems have several attractive advantages over yeast, bacterial, or mammalian systems. Namely that they’re less susceptible to contamination, and can dramatically lower the cost of production. This also, in my mind, makes something like an algal bio production system an ideal starting point for small scale, “democratized” bioproduction technologies. I focused on the tobacco plant early on in the project because it is a “model” organism, meaning there is already a large body of research on the plant, it’s genetics, metabolic pathways, etc. It has been metabolically engineered to produce human collagen as well as several vaccines. It also has an unusually high level of cholesterol compared to other plants, and has been previously successfully modified to accumulate cholesterol, and to express the first gene in the human steroid hormone metabolic pathway which effectively increased production of pregnenolone and progesterone.

[IMAGE CREDIT Ma, Julian K-C., Pascal M. W. Drake, and Paul Christou. "Genetic Modification: The Production of Recombinant Pharmaceutical Proteins in Plants." Nat Rev Genet Nature Reviews Genetics 4.10 (2003): 794-805. Web.]

The other reason I’m focusing on a plant system is because a French pharma company has already successfully engineered yeast to produce human steroid hormones (their published research deals with hydrocortisone specifically) and subsequently filed for patent. As far as published research goes - higher plants and algal hosts are uncharted territory for estrogen and androgen production, and aren’t currently subject to ownership claims.

I understand that you’re in a trial stage currently, and you are working on “synthesizing necessary genes and producing transformation plasmids that will be shared with collaborators.” Can you explain this process as well?

Yes - basically, there are established methods for “designing” genes - creating sequences of nucleotides that are optimized to do what you want them to do in an organism. There is a lot that is not understood still, and a lot of unpredictability -- but there are ways to designate expression levels of genes, ensure proper folding of proteins, signal transport to specific areas within the cell, and support interaction with other molecules through the design of the gene sequences. It’s a lot of reading papers, seeing what worked for other people, messing with sequences of nucleotides, and the eventually sending off your designed sequence to a company that does gene synthesis. Once the gene is synthesized and mailed to you, it can be ligated (covalently bonded onto other DNA fragments with an enzyme called ligase) into a plasmid -- which is just a circular segment of DNA that can be easily transformed into microbes for expression and replication. With the assistance of a plant pathogen called agrobacterium - the synthesized genes can be inserted into plants. In the wild, agrobacterium genetically modify plants - inserting genes that encode production of auxins (plant hormones that induce tumor growth) and other genes that cause the plant to produce nutrients for the bacteria to feed off of. The tumors are called, “crown galls,” once I learned what they look like, I started to notice them everywhere.

You’re taking new precautions during this stage of the project to protect the work from being co-opted and monetized. What led you to this development, and how are you ensuring that you keep the project open to collaboration but guarded from the same companies and corporations that create this accessibility issue in the first place?

There is a trend in the “open source science,” biohacking, and diybio community to open research and dedicate scientific tools to the public domain or “commons” by publishing (after which it is considered “prior art” rendering it unpatentable and open to reuse or modification by anyone). The problem with this is that small modifications can still be patented. For example, let's say that publicly funded research shows that a newly discovered plant contains a potent cancer-therapeutic, which the researchers successfully produced in a bioreactor with transgenic yeast. A pharmaceutical company could then tweak the system outlined in that study to make production more efficient -- then patent the organism or process as an invention and monopolize the market. And this in fact is what happens all the time - research is funded by public tax dollars, and then snatched up by a private company that claims exclusive rights to something which stands on the shoulders of an entire community outside the patent holder.

I also had some discussions with activists and organizers in Baltimore’s queer and trans community and the one message I was hearing from everyone was, “are you really doing enough to protect the work from being co-opted and monetized?” That really resonated with me, so after that I started to work harder to educate myself and search for some way to create this “openness” that is necessary for collaborative science (especially something as complex as metabolic engineering), while still protecting the work from being scooped up and patented by some “business-minded” person.

So with all that in mind I’m working on a web platform to enable secure communication between contractually bound collaborators, as well as to provide a public facing component. Last fall I connected with a biotech lawyer who offered to do some pro-bono work for the project and create a terms of service document for the website which stipulates that if a person uses information or plasmid DNA provided through the website, they must agree to contribute their results and data back to the community under the same terms

After you produce the work that can be shared with collaborators, where can you see this project going? Do you have a desired outcome? --I’m sure outcome is the wrong word, but I’m interested in knowing what effects this research could have.

I am not trained as a scientist -- I am really pushing my mind to do this work because I love the idea and I want to see if flourish. I enjoy the challenge, and the process has been very transformative for me. Scientific research takes a long time, and is inherently uncertain -- especially when dealing with the complexity of biological systems. I’ve had to learn to be open to that uncertainty and to the possibility of finding answers that are not necessarily leading in the direction I started with.

Did you imagine there would be such an overwhelming response to this project when you began it?

I really didn’t -- and I think overwhelming is such a good way to put it. It was actually so beautiful after running the crowdfunder, to hear from many other people who had thought about pursuing the same research and wanted to see it progress. There were also many valid critiques of what the project could become that I had to spend a lot of time with before I felt comfortable proceeding.

Have you found many others working between these communities? Any other exciting people or projects you’d like to highlight?

I’m very excited to see the Open Source Insulin project progress.

There is a group called Gynepunk out of Spain that I think is doing very interesting work on creating DIY/DIWO tools and methods for gynecology.

I’m also a big fan of Paloma Lopez and Leslie Garcia’s work. They have started the Interspecifics Collective in Mexico City, and work on creating open source tools to explore interspecies communication and aesthetics -- generating sound compositions from the movement and electromagnetic activities of microbes and plants as they are affected by human touch and other interactions.

There is also a person named Mary Maggic who is doing what she calls “River Gynecology” by adapting protocols for detecting estrogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals in waterways with transgenic yeast to a DIY/DIWO context.

I also think that “biohacking” is such a buzz topic right now because it seems very edgy and punk, but there’s a lot of really exciting work happening within the “open source science” movement that isn’t highlighted because it’s not as slick and high-tech heavy as other things. Mboa Nkoudou is doing really interesting work -- expanding on Shiv Visvanathan’s concept of, “Cognitive Justice” to contextualize the open source movement or the “maker movement” to the global south. I met Mboa at the Global Open Science Hardware Conference, where he facilitated discussions on the ways “Open Source” and “Maker Culture” participate in neo-colonialism, and how to change the culture of these communities in the west so that we’re not contributing to neo-colonial efforts intentionally or ignorantly.

Max Liboiron who runs a feminist marine science lab in Canada called Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) is also doing really great work to have critical discussions about equity in the Open Source Science Hardware community.

I was reading about a previous project you did in 2014 titled In Between Utopia and Dystopia, which involved collaborating with a group of high schoolers to speculate how emerging fields in science and tech may shape the future. I’ve been reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity, which challenges us to consider a Queer Utopia.

In his introduction, Muñoz states “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” and argues that a queer utopia is necessary to envision as it provides a roadmap towards a better future and an escape from a present where a shortsighted queer politics edges towards assimilation.

Because of your project’s intrinsic futurity and your practice’s history with speculative design, I wanted to know if you’ve considered a Queer Utopia - or would like to, if only for a moment.  

[SPECULATIVE PRODUCT DESIGNS BY  Se’daysia Cooper-Lee, Nhiaya Williams, Tayler Corporal, Reona Macklin, Dominique Stepney ]

Yes definitely, this work actually grew out of a speculative fiction practice where I was thinking a lot about what utopic technologies might look like to me. That period of time when I was facilitating speculative fiction workshops was the same time period when I started getting involved at the Baltimore Underground Science Space. In my personal life, I had for a long time been following this scientific discourse on gender and sexual variation that I was exposed to when I was in college in neuroscience classes, and I didn’t really know what to do with it yet.

For me as a non-binary queer person, to learn that there were people putting so much time and money into studying gender and sexual variance was really striking. There’s an immediate anxiety, when you see that people are working so hard to find genetic and neuronal and hormonal differences to define and categorize you (and making money off of it), but there’s also this element of curiosity involved when you see someone offering a neat and tidy deterministic explanation for your own experience. There’s also the underlying fear that the search for a cause, always has the potential to become the search for a cure, or some method of biopolitical regulation of subjectivities.

One of the areas that was really fascinating to me was the study of human pheromones. These experiments were very controversial because the way they were structured was filled with bias, and others were not able to reproduce the results consistently. But independent of any discussion of their validity as scientific contributions, they started to become folk knowledge as all these pop articles started circulating their claims: that women were happier and more productive in the presence of male sweat and male pheromones. I started to hear these ideas repeated, I think because it fit so conveniently into our binary socialization of man as a physical laborer and woman as the emotional laborer or the fem customer servant. And it was as if the studies were attempting to naturalize this social contract as reciprocal, innate, and inescapable: Male labor produces sweat, and optimizes the female to do emotional labor. This became my entry point, and I started imagining advertisements for a product that would take advantage and capitalize on this discourse. A desktop bioreactor housing engineered microbes that produce “male” pheremones, marketed to women as a mode of neoliberal empowerment -- or marketed to companies as a way to “optimize” the female worker.

As I dug deeper in the literature, I learned that a lot of pharmaceutical hormones used in birth control and hrt are actually produced by feeding plant oils to microbes during a fermentation process. These pharmaceutical production facilities are like massive prosthetic organs that modulate the enactment of binary gendered subjectivities. This invisible symbiotic relationship between our society and microbes which we’re reliant on for external production of hormones was really interesting, so I started exploring ways to create wearables that might foster a closer or more intentional symbiosis with these microbes.

But ultimately I was drawn more to the possibility of using metabolic engineering to develop a bioproduction system for sex hormones, and dedicate it to the public domain. This drew me I think because it has the potential to act on a poetic and performative level, as well as on a more pragmatic level -- becoming a platform to imagine and manifest desires into a queer technology, rather than just a speculative fiction or a “cultural critique.”

[topwellnesspro-blog]

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[archcancercare-blog]

Is Prostate Cancer Treatable?

For men who learn that they have prostate cancer, it is difficult to determine what to do. They would like to know if the condition is treatable and how so that they can work towards healing. If that is you, please read this article from Arch Cancer Care in Saint Louis, MO. Prostate cancer patients inside the Saint Louis area will be happy they read this important article about how to get the cancer treatment they need.

The outlook for men diagnosed with prostate cancer has never been brighter. Physicians now have a variety of ways to handle prostate cancer, including surgery, radiation, and drugs which slow the growth of cancer cells. Both the safety and effectiveness of prostate cancer treatments has been gradually improving.

That's great news, of course. However with so many separate approaches to prostate cancer treatment, each with its very own benefits and risks, weighing your options and choosing the most appropriate treatment may be complicated. The best treatment for each and every man is dependent on his stage of cancer and how aggressively the cancer cells are growing. For example, a man with early prostate cancer which is slow growing might opt for watchful waiting. Another man with early prostate cancer which is growing aggressively might choose surgery plus radiation, or some other mixture of therapies.

Here are the fundamentals you should know about the leading treatments for prostate cancer.

Does Watchful Waiting Work For Prostate Cancer?

As a result of screening and early detection, numerous prostate cancers are first detected long before they pose a threat. Indeed, many of the cancers spotted by PSA tests and biopsies prove to be very early cancers or so slow-growing that they never pose a life-threatening danger.

Due to early diagnosis, the best approach for a growing number of men is to keep track of the cancer for indications that it is worsening. Called active surveillance or "watchful waiting," this technique makes it possible for men with early-stage or very slow growing prostate cancer to avoid treatment and its adverse effects-- or actively monitor the disease and to take action if the cancer grows or spreads.

Believe it or not, many men are well suited for the watchful waiting strategy, some estimates indicate that as many as forty percent fall under that category. Men who might be best for this method include those for whom the prostate cancer is detected early, those who might be especially detrimentally affected by surgical treatment or radiation due to poor health, and the elderly.

Naturally, watchful waiting is not some last resort for when nothing else will work. It can often stop someone from obtaining a treatment that might not work or may be unneeded. Let's not ignore the "watchful" part of "watchful waiting." Those utilizing this method will be very carefully observed with PSA tests, ultrasounds, CT scans, bone scans, rectal exams, imaging, and follow-up biopsies at the discernment of your physician. That is the reason why they also call it "active surveillance." It is a deceptively active technique. All of that is designed to lead you to the most ideal next step, if one is required. Some men who do watchful waiting discover that they do not require any further treatment whatsoever.

Is Radiation Prostate Cancer Treatment My Only Option?

When it comes to prostate cancer treatment, most people's minds are going to leap immediately to radiation treatment. Those same minds will almost always jump to the very worst case scenario of terrible side effects. Definitely, there are some very tragic cases where folks are negatively affected by radiation treatment. However, there have been a considerable amount of extremely promising advances in this technology which particularly targets the cancer cells, making the treatment more effective while minimizing the chance for adverse effects.

Here are a few of the choices which will be offered to you:

Radioactive Seed Implants: This treatment calls for little radioactive metal "seeds" to be surgically implanted into the prostate gland. In time, the seeds release radiation over a significant time period. Usually, this method may be really effective at shielding the rectum from harm, but the radioactive seed method can impact urinary and sexual function.

External Beam Radiation: This is what the majority of people think about whenever they think of radiation therapy. For five days a week for approximately eight weeks, the patient is going to be subjected to approximately 20 minutes of high-energy x-rays. While that might seem very painful, it is in fact not painful at all. Nevertheless, common side effects of this type of treatment may consist of impaired sexual and urinary function, fatigue, loss of appetite, and urinary or anal bleeding.

Proton Therapy: This is quite similar to the aforementioned external beam radiation, but it employs a different variety of beam which may at times reach deeper tissues.

What Can Prostate Cancer Hormone Therapy Do For Me?

Just like anything else, prostate cancer requires something to feed on to grow. Depriving prostate cancer of testosterone and some other key hormones is practically the same thing as taking away its food. Even though this treatment will not entirely eliminate the cancer, it will stymie development of the tumor and possibly reduce its size. Although it could result in some very promising results for you, you might wish to know that you may experience fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, and a loss of sex drive or perhaps impotence.

Hormone therapy may be boiled down to three prevalent treatments. Androgen Deprivation Therapy (ADT) is an injection provided monthly or annually and may be given for life if no other treatment is pursued. Anti-Androgens are given in pill form together with other treatments. Orchiectomy is when the testicles are surgically removed in order to significantly decrease the production of testosterone.

What About Surgical Options For Prostate Cancer?

Most people are not aware of the broad array of surgical options available to men with prostate cancer. Undoubtedly, each of these procedures possess their own benefits and dangers and therefore have certain applications depending upon your condition. The professionals at Arch Cancer Care in Saint Louis, MO have substantial expertise and can help you discover the treatment that would be best for you.

Nerve-Sparing Surgery: This is a very delicate procedure which consists of cutting away the prostate tissue directly while very carefully avoiding the adjacent nerve bundles without causing them any sort of damage. The advantage of this particular procedure is that it can often prevent any damage to erection capabilities, but the drawback is that it is a really challenging procedure and it calls for a very competent surgeon.

High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound: This surgery is basically like radiation treatment on steroids. It includes pounding the affected area with high-energy ultrasound waves. In theory, the cancer cells ought to be totally destroyed.

Open Radical Retropubic Prostatectomy: This is one of the most common options for prostate cancer surgery. Essentially, the surgeon creates an incision to eliminate the prostate and the lymph nodes encompassing it to guarantee that the cancer is completely removed. Although urinary and sexual function can frequently be protected, this particular operation requires a stay of a minimum of a couple of days in the hospital and often a temporary urinary catheter.

Radical Perineal Prostatectomy: This surgery has the same basic idea of the open radical retropubic prostatectomy, however the incision is made within the area in between the anus and the scrotum. This technique results in less bleeding, but it only works if the prostate cancer is limited to the prostate itself.

Laparoscopic Prostatectomy: Once again, this has the same basic idea of the open radical retropubic prostatectomy, however with this procedure a number of small incisions are made into the abdominal area.

Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy: While depending on technology for something like this might seem quite unnerving, a competent surgeon can use this prostate cancer surgery in Saint Louis, MO to result in a much shorter hospital stay and a much faster recovery time.

Cryosurgery: This approach is a newer method which has not been adopted on a wide scale. Basically, this technique relies on very small tubes of liquid nitrogen being passed across the cancerous area in order to freeze off the cancer. While this operation can make it possible for the patient to leave the hospital on the day of the surgical treatment, it is not more commonly accepted due to the fact that there is a quite elevated chance of damage to the rectum or urethra because of the unpredictable nature of cryosurgery.

If you live in Saint Louis and you or someone you know has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have to realize that there are lots of prostate cancer treatments in Saint Louis, MO. Please arrange an appointment to learn just what options could be right for you. Prostate cancer is not a little something you can manage on your own. The professionals at Arch Cancer Care are going to give you the tools you require to take the next step.

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StackT 360 - Boost Your Muscle Development And Vitality

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Here are detailed instructions. Being in a testosterone brand names community should be the crucial thing that's lacking.

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I'll show you the following StackT 360 info. I've been booked years ahead. I'm trying to locate an important expert. Don't wait for it. Doing it helps me establish a perspective. If you're providing some inconvenience, there's nothing fake about it. That variety is really weak. I have good materials. Most of the specialists here before now know that. I thought a good topic would be my quantity. But there's more… Trust me, that can be unpredictable. The biggest plus about having my theorem is probably having this thing more frequently. At that time improvements in a case in point could also be seen in that. It could cause certain alarm relating to this because you won't locate a qualified person for the job. What happens when the joke does not work anymore? I certainly have my fill of gentlemen using it. I suppose this is the most critical part of cognoscenti using it. Some folks choose using it while others may choose that responsibility instead. It's the beauty of StackT 360.

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