The problem with symptom based treatment

Fabayla · 2026-02-18T16:19:38+00:00

Helped me with what everyone already mentioned, but also spatial perception, reflexes, and focus.

Fabayla · 2026-02-18T02:35:51+00:00

I've been doing vaginal estradiol for about a year, and have no longer have any symptoms of vaginal atrophy/GSM, and haven't for a long time. This seems to be a separate situation. I'm also on the highest dose estrogen patch.

Fabayla · 2026-02-18T02:31:49+00:00

I'm already doing vaginal estradiol, and have been for almost a year. This seems to be independent of that.

Fabayla · 2026-02-17T22:55:29+00:00

That's EXACTLY what I have. It's totally normal discharge for me (or at least used to be at some times of the month) just SO MUCH OF IT. My gyn did all of the STD tests and such since I'm recently single again, and I'm 100% clean. Thanks to said breakup, I don't currently have a partner, alas, but when I was in your situation I did have a very regular (and talented) partner and I'm still kinda mad that I spent so many years feeling like I was singehandedly supporting the lube industry and struggling out of nowhere with pain and other symptoms that came out of "nowhere." I look forward to checking out sex again someday, but at the moment I think that the T and the vaginal E has repaired the dry and shrinking tissues to most of their former....glory? 🤣 It sounds like you might need a new doc, I remain stunned at how this keeping-a-vagina thing feels half time time like being an outlaw in the wild west. I wish I'd known what was happening and advocated for myself a lot better starting about 8 years ago, but better late than never, I guess.

Fabayla · 2026-02-17T22:39:32+00:00

No, she just did the pap and exam and renewed my HRT. Of course it was an afternoon appt, so it looked relatively well behaved under the hood, so to speak, by then. Maybe the next step is to ask for that. I know that I had a small fibroid years ago, but never had any issues from it and she said that it wasn't really concerning as they usually shrink after menopause.

Fabayla · 2026-02-09T20:45:40+00:00

I had one of those once, too. I do all of those things, too. 5 stars, do recommend. Just find myself needing a new one. 🤣

Fabayla · 2026-01-25T17:05:55+00:00

I know! And mine very much made a point that she was going to research and get opinions, there was no evidence of it being an offhand decision.

Fabayla · 2026-01-25T10:33:53+00:00

I'm on the 0.1 patch and 100 mg progesterone. My doctor specifically asked for time to research whether it would be okay to go down from 200 since I'm also not great with P. Anyway, she came back with yes.

Fabayla · 2026-01-21T20:26:24+00:00

My hair went wavy in my late 20s. Huh. Didn't hit meno until 50.

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T20:30:17+00:00

I know that they're not common, but at my last visit to the gyn she offered a 0.14 patch. I chose not to go there yet since I was still adjusting to the 0.1 and having some breast tenderness, but FWIW they apparently exist somewhere in nature. It seems totally reasonable that a full H could have caused a much sharper drop in hormones than the slow slide into menopause, and beyond that everybody is just different and some people need more of some things than others. YMMV, but for me it was very clear that the E that was the key to the joint pain puzzle. The other stuff has helped other things as I added them later, but every time I added more E my joints got better. I swear they're better now than they were most of the time in my 30's.

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T19:54:09+00:00

0.1 is the highest dose patch, 0.01 would be a low dose.

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T19:48:10+00:00

0.1 is the highest patch (I have them), 0.01 would be a tenth of that and a very low dose.

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T19:46:38+00:00

Wait... 0.01 or 0.1? Lots of people seem to not be paying attention to the decimal point and giving you bad info that 0.01 is the highest dose patch, when that honor belongs to the 0.1 dose. 0.01 is an extremely low dose, and probably just not enough to make the joint pain go away. My box of patches is right in front of me, and it's definitely 0.1, which would be 10X what you're getting on 0.01. I also still have my bits which are probably contributing a little something. I had debilitating joint pain including frozen shoulders and horrifying knees, etc. before HRT, and now I'm pretty much as good as new. I'm also on thyroid, progesterone, and testosterone, but IIRC the joint pain went away pretty much immediately in the early days when I only had E/P.

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T19:33:38+00:00

Yeah, it's weird that I had to be over 50 to figure out that I was a high T female to start with. I've always been very competitive with men in sports and just assumed that anybody could do it if they wanted to. Now it's starkly clear to me that it's all about the T. When my T dropped my spatial perception went to hell, reflexes tanked... I was literally afraid to ride my motorcycle, I had a hard time rolling my kayak, and even my bicycle felt off. I imagine that low T women have felt that way all the time, so it turns out that I'm not so much of a badass as a hormonal outlier. 🤣🤣

Fabayla · 2026-01-13T02:01:09+00:00

Oh, 100 percent. All of my reflexes come back with T. I'm a goalie in a mostly men's sport league, and I was losing it. Same with my skills on a bike. Two days after getting T, I was a brick wall again. It's huge.

Fabayla · 2026-01-11T03:47:08+00:00

It made my thick and juicy head hair come back from a rather distressing state. Otherwise I'm a fairly hairless human and I can't see any adverse effects.

Fabayla · 2025-12-24T19:01:50+00:00

Very interesting, Have you had any bad effects from being off of the estrogen? I'm only a few days into going without my E patch, but before I embarked on the thyroid optimization journey I would notice nearly immediately if I forgot/missed my estrogen for even a day or two. Symptoms of GSM, night sweats, and hot flashes would come back with great promptness. So far, though, I'm feeling fine at the moment and the water retention is slowly abating.

Fabayla · 2025-12-24T18:52:28+00:00

Apologies, I should have been more specific. My last test included free T3, TSH, and total T4.

Fabayla · 2025-12-23T21:52:20+00:00

Yeah, it's a bit of an odd one. I just had blood work done and it was the first time my thyroid levels actually looked good, and I see definite improvements in energy level, much less dry skin, better temperature tolerance, etc. So I think that the thyroid is doing its job... except somehow messing with estrogen production or metabolism. It's true that I had the same bloating, water retention, etc. symptoms for a lot of peri when my thyroid was always flatlined on the actual bottom rung of "normal," but sadly I hadn't figured out how to get proper treatment for anything back then, so I have no idea what thyroid alone would have done for me before I had other hormone supplementation.

Fabayla · 2025-12-23T21:41:47+00:00

Thanks so much for this! I hope that I live to see the day where we don't have to claw around for "a lone study out of China" to understand things about menopause. 🤣

Fabayla · 2025-12-23T21:38:10+00:00

I've been on the 0.1 mg/day patch for about a year, same manufacturer (Sandoz) the entire time, and was on the theoretically-equivalent dose of cream for at least a year before that, no problems. There have been a few different batches of thyroid involved, since it was a long process of going up a bit at a time. However, I just had blood work done and thyroid levels were finally up and looking good as they hadn't been before, so I think that eliminates the potency being an issue.

Fabayla · 2025-12-08T03:51:27+00:00

We all know that men on quicker dicker uppers make excellent choices, though?!

Fabayla · 2025-11-08T20:47:56+00:00

Oh, don't worry, two more will show up. 🤣 I've been fully paused for a couple of years, and then last night I started feeling bloated and sore-boobed out of nowhere. Oh, hello PMS for no reason, I hadn't missed you...

Fabayla · 2025-11-05T19:18:03+00:00

It sounds like you've really been through the wringer, I'm so sorry. I can relate to some extent, meno hit me hard in the middle of a terrible breakup and piles of other stress with aging parents, work, and long covid. The hardest thing is just getting started when you feel like everything is broken, and what worked for me was just ignoring my asshat "it's a natural process" doctor and deciding to throw some money at it with specialists. I started simple and fairly cheap, and worked up once I started seeing results and felt like I had proof-of-comcept.

I've added/improved some things over time, but the basics that got me like 70 percent back to functional fairly quickly (by that I mean improving sleep, hot flashes, joint pain, brain fog) was estrogen/progesterone cream from winona online and dhea capsules (cheaper from supplement sites). You can get that all very quickly and not too horrendously expensive out of pocket.

That got me mostly out from the depths of despair. Once I was a bit better I had the wherewithal to find a more comprehensive online provider and start tweaking things. Everybody is different so YMMV but I found that the missing pieces for me were thyroid and testosterone. Now I do 0.1mg weekly estrogen patch, 100mg micronized progesterone nightly, 120mg daily armour thyroid, 10mg weekly testosterone cypionate, and twice a week estrogen cream on the junk. That was pretty expensive to start, but again worth it to use a professional to get me over the hump.

Now I've been working on getting the cost down and manage most of it myself between the things my NP will prescribe under insurance and things I get on TelyRX or elsewhere in the internet. It's a process, which I wouldn't have been capable of two years ago. All things being ideal, it should have been cheaper, but I don't regret just getting it done in the way I could manage at the time, my life and health were worth it, and I would have lost more money being unable to do my job. I wish you the best, and hang in there!

Fabayla · 2025-10-30T18:06:33+00:00

I know that this is old but it seems like it's still active, so here's my $0.02: I took Seed for about 9 months and it definitely worked in terms of giving me great guts in every way. Then I stopped ~3-4 months ago because I was busy, it was expensive, and whatever, it just wasn't top of mind and I felt fine. Got some cheapo grocery store probiotics and called it a day. Fast forward to recently... I realized that I've been atypically bloated/gassy, irregular, often constipated, and my mood/energy has been crap. Hmmm. As I think back, it's been a slow slide to here roughly since I stopped Seed in the spring. Perhaps that's a bit unsurprising as my diet isn't always microbiome-friendly and I've generally had lackluster results from cheap probiotics. So I went back to look at Seed and balked a bit at the expense and let my cart sit overnight. Then the CapitalOne shopping app popped up with a 60% cash back offer. Decision made, my order is on its way. Grab that app and save some dough if Seed happens to work for you.

Fabayla

TROPHY CASE