The talk of MMA these days is Testosterone Replacement Therapy. I’ve said openly that five years ago such a practice was just another day of shooting up steroids. Is it cheating? What are the benefits? What are the harms? Well, for the sake of knowing what I am talking about, I have started testosterone replacement therapy myself.
My thought process was simple. Get on TRT, find a gym and then challenge Cain Velasquez for his belt. That is what happens right? You start on the stuff and you become a super athlete.
Just kidding.
My journey to testosterone replacement therapy came at a weird time. For those that don’t really know me I’ll give you a brief background. I work for the Kentucky State Police as a Criminal Intelligence Analyst by day and I am a blogger by night. I often times sit in front of a computer screen for 10 or more hours a day. In my younger years I was an athlete. Now I am just an overweight 33 year old trying to burn the candle at both ends with a wife and daughter that need my attention as well as a couple of jobs that take up quite a bit of my time. I started noticing that all I wanted to do was sleep and I was way more irritable than normal. If you ask my wife I’m always an asshole but I felt way more like Brian Furby than normal.
I went to my family doctor for a routine physical and was ready to diagnose myself with several things. In my head I was suffering from diabetes, sleep apnea, seasonal depression or the cool thing to have, that’s right, low testosterone.
A blood test was done and I was to return in a week. The scales were not kind to me at all. I am embarrassed to say that I weighed 371 pounds. Holy shit someone call Richard Simmons. Life changing, I think.
Back to see my pal the doctor again in a week to talk about my issues. I had lost 11 pounds in 7 days. The news got better when I found out that I did not have diabetes, my cholesterol was great, blood pressure had improved but I did have very low testosterone. I was told that the average male my age should have a level in the numeric range of 250-500. This guy’s level, 141.
I was ready for an injection! It wasn’t that easy though. My next trip was to the urologist to rule out some other issues such as testicular cancer and pituitary gland malfunction. Oh by the way, I wouldn’t know what was going to happen next for about 3 weeks. I found this out on December 20th 2013.
Merry Christmas to me, and a Happy New Year too, because a “trip to the urologist” involves exactly what you think it does. So keep an eye out next week for my new advice column: Proper etiquette during prostate exams.
The TRT Diary is a personal blog about testosterone replacement therapy and how it truly works in a real case of hypogonadism. The details may be graphic, but are all true. Enjoy!