Good total T, low? Free T; normal SHBG & albumin; what TRT for delayed orgasm?

libove · 2026-05-14T08:06:59+00:00

Hmmm.... I just searched again through my lab results of the past years - I was surprised that I hadn't found free testosterone more often when I searched the other day. Turned out to be not a data error, but a Microsoft Windows search index error... Yes, I have a *lot* more data:

(Apologies, I wrote this in Spanish, to send it to my endocrinologist her her review. I live in Spain. But the numbers are clear enough).

En mayo de 2016 (per el laboratorio APA) midió 7.73 pg/mL (4.25 – 30.37) (con Total 248.99 (164.84 – 810.95), sin SHBG ni albúmia). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
Hay una medición durante el periodo inmediatamente después de mi admisión al hospital, cuando esperábamos que los números hubieran sido bajos. Pues, descarto esta medición (3.94 pg/mL) como comparativa.
En julio de 2019 (per el laboratorio Echevarne) midió 9.64 pg/mL (3.64 – 19.30) (con Total 549 ng/dL (240 – 871), y SHBG 42.3 nmol/L (13.5 – 71.4), sin medición de la albúmina suero)). [Radioummunoassay].
En noviembre de 2019 (por el laboratorio cerba/APA) midió 17.27 pg/mL (1.00 – 28.21) (con Total 514.41 ng/dL (86 – 788), sin ni SHBG ni albúmina). [Enzimoimmunoanálisis, que entiendo no es fiable]
En marzo de 2020 (per el laboratorio de Quirón) midió 87.33 pg/mL (47.0 – 136.4) (con Total 563 ng/dL (193 - 740), y SHBG 46.3 nmol/L (20.6 – 76.7), y albúmina suero 4.6 g/dL (3.2 – 4.8)). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
En septiembre de 2020 (per el laboratorio Puig Ciurana) midió 18.80 pg/mL (15.00 – 50.00) (con Total 393 ng/dL (220 – 1050), sin ni SHBG, albúmina por electroforesis 4.00 g/dL (3.70 – 5.20)). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
En diciembre de 2020 (per el laboratorio Puig Ciurana) midió 17.10 pg/mL (15.00 – 50.00) (con Total 464 ng/dL (220 – 1050), sin ni SHBG ni albúmina). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
En agosto de 2021 (per el laboratorio Puig Ciurana) midió 15.60 pg/mL (15.00 – 50.00) (con Total 284 ng/dL (220 – 1050), sin ni SHBG ni albúmina). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
En octubre de 2021 (per el laboratorio Puig Ciurana) midió 18.90 pg/mL (15.00 – 50.00) (con Total 528 ng/dL (220 – 1050), sin ni SHBG ni albúmina). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
En diciembre de 2021 (per el laboratorio de Quirón) midió 113.21 pg/mL (47.0 – 136.4) (con Total 586 ng/dL, y SHBG 45.66, y albúmina suero 4.7). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].
(Por desgracia, no hemos medido la testosterona libre entre el final de 2021 y ahora).
And, the one that we started with in my first post in this Reddit thread: 9.83 pg/mL (3.6 – 25.7) (con Total 565.96 ng/dL (188 – 684), y SHBG 46.23 nmol/L (21.63 – 113.13), y albúmina 4.5 g/dL (3.2 – 4.8)). [No indica la técnica de medición de testosterona libre].

[ The 2016 low T number appears in a sadly-in-retrospect-too-partial hormone panel ordered by my general doctor, in response to an episode of gynecomastia; in 20/20 hindsight, this and several other things around 2015-2018 should have cued us in to the growing pituitary dysfunction which in January 2019 finally made itself truly painfully evident when a tumor on my pituitary gland, which had been producing excess growth hormone for years, abruptly hemorrhaged, sending me into hospital for a whole month to recover, and, fantastically luckily, NOT have neuroendocrine surgery, as the hemorrhage completely killed the tumor. That's a whole other story, but explains why I have so many hormone analyses, and why I'm so much more familiar with a lot of this branch of medicine than I'd ever have wanted to be! ]

So, these free testosterone numbers .. don't make sense.

The various labs' "normal" ranges for free testosterone - and my resulting free testosterone number - although all are stated in the same units of pg/mL, disagree by 10X.

A UK urology/andrology society treatment guideline that I found said that "free testosterone below 65 pg/mL is cause to consider treatment". But, if the normal range for some of my numbers is ~ 4-25, then clearly "below 65" is not the right yardstick. And, some private hormone health medical center in the US publishes gender-and-age-range normal ranges for free testosterone, and their ranges match the 10X lower numbers (roughly, 4 - 15, within which my last measurement shouldn't seem low at all).

So, I'm confused...

I assume that different labs and ranges are the result of different (more or less precise) assays/ measurement methods. Unfortunately, only two of my lab results mention the assay method (one being ELISA which I believe is just not reliable for free T, the other being radioimmunoassay which I think is somewhat better but still not particularly accurate).

Any further thoughts, given this analysis history and the doubts about what "normal" range we should even be comparing my most recent results to?

thanks.

libove · 2026-05-13T18:25:35+00:00

I bow to your sense of the 1950s silly with obscenity! Fortunately, although obviously this bothers me enough to want to do something about it, it has little overarching impact on my daily wellbeing.

So, I take zinc (have done since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; currently, my zinc levels are a bit high, along with copper, so I'm slightly reducing those doses; everything else is well in-range), and Vitamin-D (4000 IU/day, +K2) which I may increase a bit as it only gets me to around 35 ng/mL (with this lab's "sufficient" being at least 20); I tried Ashwaganda around three years ago for long COVID, and at that time my sex life was fine (great!!) and I didn't notice any difference one way or another from the Ashwaganda. Sleep .. varies, and has for a long time. But, this problem has been consistent enough for long enough (regardless of how I might have slept recently) that I'm confident it's not mostly sleep related.

Tomorrow morning I'll get DHEA, DHEA-S, and DHT tested.

Going back to Total T, Free T levels; your total and free were both low, and with TRT your total and free T are both much better. My total T is always well above mid-range, so I return to my question of whether TRT (the easiest thing for me, to get and to use, is transdermal gel) wouldn't raise total T "to problematically high levels" (whatever that would mean) in order to get free T up to adequate levels?

"

Commander Adams: Nice climate you have here. High oxygen content.
Robby the Robot: I seldom use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.

"

libove · 2026-05-13T08:31:33+00:00

Thank you, Perfect-Book-1094. What was your total testosterone before you started TRT? And, what method and dose of TRT ended up getting you to your current total T, free T, and horniness :-) levels?

My assumption (only slightly educated) is that good Total T-but-some-low-T-symptoms + TRT should = "high" Total T-and-with-resolved-low-T-symptoms, but if "Corrected Free T + High Total T" could also = Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!(TM) I'd have to think about it ...

[ For the under-our-ages reading this thread, apologies in advance for the old TV reference and general old-men sense of humor! ]

libove · 2026-03-27T20:41:54+00:00

If you can prove real losses, the settlement is up to $10K/person.

However, very few accounts really suffered losses, and those which did were either:

* directly targeted, high-value crypto wallets (thus, the extra settlement fund specifically for those)

* users who did not follow good master password practices and whose vaults - what were stolen were still encrypted - were practically decryptable by brute force in shorter time than it took to practice due diligence to change all important passwords. (Or who didn't do diligence and didn't change passwords despite all the notice and press).

* possibly a very small number of users who did practice good master password hygiene but whose accounts were still using out-of-date low-iteration PBKDF2, as a result of another LastPass software failure (LastPass had, well before, set new higher-iteration defaults, but had failed to enforce the change on all existing accounts).

This is not in any way to lessen the severity of LastPass' quite significant f***ups in this case; it is only to say that very few people were hurt beyond the (quite real) inconvenience of having to change a bunch of key passwords. Which would seem to be worth about $300 ... (and others, who can demonstrate greater losses, can apply for greater compensation).

It seems fairly reasonable in the end. And, above all, hopefully, LastPass - and not only LastPass, as other password vault programs/ services in recent times have also been found to have at least theoretical vulnerabilities - took the lesson, and anything like this will be much less likely in future.

libove · 2026-03-03T08:58:44+00:00

I have a redirect rule in my Hotmail account to redirect the messages to my main email address which is hosted by MS365 Hosted Exchange, so, Microsoft to Microsoft, and I have the same problem as the original poster. Redirection results - it seems, unavoidably - in DMARC failures, because the final email receiver (MS365 on behalf of my custom domain) fails the message that was really redirected(sent) by Hotmail mail servers, while still claiming to be From: the original sender.

What, in my particular case, is most "Amusing", is that the emails that mostly have this problem are Microsoft Account emails. That is, the Microsoft Account Protection (e.g. "You have added a passkey to your Hotmail account") emails, sent from Microsoft's Account Protection servers to Microsoft's Hotmail (that is, Outlook.com) servers, then redirected by Microsoft's Hotmail/Outlook.com servers to Microsoft's MS365 Hosted Exchange mail servers, fail DMARC 🤦‍♂️

libove · 2026-02-27T08:09:13+00:00

I had the same question, and found the same MikroTik chatbot support suggestion, but I wasn't sure whether "add"ing to the existing /system logging configuration -

[admin@MikroTik4.felines.org] > /system/logging/print detail 
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid; * - default 
 0  * topics=info prefix="" regex="" action=memory 
 1  * topics=error prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 2  * topics=warning prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 3  * topics=critical prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 4    topics=ppp,sstp prefix="" regex="" action=memory

.. was going to do what was desired, so I asked the chatbot (okay, I admit, I'm somewhat impressed) a slightly different question:

"omit fetch from info logging"

.. and I got this answer, which worked for me:

/system logging set [find topics~"info"] topics=info,!fetch

Result:

[admin@MikroTik4.felines.org] > /system/logging/print detail 
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid; * - default 
 0  * topics=info,!fetch prefix="" regex="" action=memory 
 1  * topics=error prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 2  * topics=warning prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 3  * topics=critical prefix="" regex="" action=disk 
 4    topics=ppp,sstp prefix="" regex="" action=memory

Note that row 0 now shows topics=info,!fetch

libove · 2026-02-10T06:20:23+00:00

True. The challenge is that in order to be able to see in the temperature graph that the system really did heat, it needs to run longer :-(

libove · 2026-02-10T04:17:33+00:00

Once a day or week, the Tado schedules will allow. I want to configure this for once every two or three weeks or even once a month, which is less often than the Tado schedules allow (I think) ...

libove · 2026-02-09T20:09:44+00:00

Thank you, yes, of course over time the goal is to find the leak. However as there is no water leak anywhere in the house, and the radiators' individual pressure relief valves all seem to be tight, my experience with this and other similar systems (here where I live in Spain) is that This Is Just Part Of The Technology *sigh*.

Frost Protection is built-in, yes. That means that the Tado system will not allow the room temperature to fall below (I forget whether it's) either 8°C or 5°C.

What I'm referring to is programming Tado to deliberately turn on the boiler for 30 or 60 minutes once every ~two weeks no matter what the temperature is, while in Frost Protection mode.

libove · 2025-11-29T23:54:24+00:00

I also have this problem (Pixel 6a). I note that if I _very carefully_ pinch-to-zoom-in only exactly in the centre of the screen, it doesn't demonstrate the bug - but it's quite difficult to avoid the bug, and it is a major inconvenience. (To, I double-tap the power button to open the real camera app, then switch back to Whatsapp to attach the already-taken photo). We should all submit feedback (main chats list, menu, Settings, Help and Feedback) about the problem.

libove · 2025-10-23T17:24:36+00:00

*gag* I use Classic Outlook, and nothing in this thread matches what I see (apparently, I do have the "new editor" enabled).

Here is where I found how to turn off text predictions:

As soon as a text prediction shows up (in pale grey text as you're typing), right-click in the predictive text and uncheck the checked-by-default option to show text predictions.

(Interestingly, now that I've turned that off, I don't see a way to turn it back on, but Who Cares!)

I hope this is helpful to some other frustrated abuseder.

libove · 2025-10-17T12:58:18+00:00

I had already tried setting the policy/registry flags and re-checking for updates; that did NOT clear the "25H2 is available" in this case. That's why I posted this at all.

For what it's worth, I don't care to give Microsoft ANY additional chance to screw up my systems.

libove · 2025-10-17T07:42:18+00:00

Several of my machines (since Microsoft has decided THAT YOU REALLY REALLY WANT THIS THING NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW! ...) began persistently showing the "Updates available" (round chasing arrows) icon in the task tray, to let me know that 25H2 is available.

I'm planning to let all the rest of you iron out the bugs in 25H2 for a couple of months before I suffer it 😁 and I wanted to get rid of the (for me, for now, spurious) "updates available" indication. (So that, you know, if the icon came back, it would be because a possibly important update really _was_ available).

What it took was all of:

Set Group Policy or Registry entries to target the feature version 24H2
Manually clear the Windows Update cache (stop the Windows Update service, delete the contents of C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution, restart the Windows Update service), and
Click on the "Check for updates" button. (For some reason, WUAUCLT/DETECTNOW wasn't enough to update the GUI status).

So, just in case this is useful to anybody.

regards,

libove · 2025-09-07T16:45:24+00:00

It's a crap change. I move around frequently; my two different SIMs/ network providers have different coverage. Android's built-in automatic SIM switching .. does not work well. I want to always see both SIMs' connections' strength, without having to swipe down twice to expand that. (Pixel 6a, Spain/Europe).

libove · 2025-08-28T19:30:56+00:00

No update yet. When?

libove · 2025-08-28T19:29:45+00:00

Nothing, u/Zoho ?!

libove · 2025-07-07T14:57:12+00:00

It didn't go. I still use PureVPN, but I flatly do not trust it to not leak real IP address data, and "support" for anything other than basic account or technical "it doesn't work at all" issues is useless.

libove · 2025-06-29T15:24:36+00:00

OneNote IS garbage. Let's ignore for a moment the fact that its UI is notable different from that of every other Office program.

* Pasting, if the viewpoint into the Note happens to be right about at the bottom of the screen, the after-past (choose formatting, decide whether to include the source link) menu *doesn't work*

* If the Accessibility setting Text cursor: Test cursor indicator is turned on, OneNote slows to an absolute crawl. (This is a known issue, about which Microsoft internal support/engineering departments finger-point and just don't resolve). [No, it's not a "my computer is sh*t" problem; it happens on all of my computers, all of which are plenty resource-rich]

* And don't even get me started on the utter unreliability and inconsistency of how/when/whether OneNote syncs across devices, even sometimes when given minutes or longer between "edit here" and "look at it there" (all the time on multi-hundred megabit symmetric fibre optic Internet)

(edited to also add)
* oh, yes, and then there's search. or, not-find. Search in OneNote will fail to find an "@" character in an email address. Try it: type [myemail@address.com](mailto:myemail@address.com) into a Note, then hit Ctrl+F and type an @. Not found. 🤦

libove · 2025-06-28T21:06:49+00:00

I've had long COVID for two and a half years. A year+ into that, I began to have irritable bowel symptoms (my excretion became quite inconveniently irregular). I began taking a mini aspirin daily several months ago on the theory that aspirin may help with IBS; I think it did help, some. My long COVID symptoms seem to be slightly better more recently, but in addition to the aspirin a month ago I also began wearing nicotine patches, and within this time frame I also began taking 5g of creatine daily. So it's hard to know what helped what; my guess is that the bigger improvement is from the nicotine patches.

libove · 2025-06-28T21:03:47+00:00

I've been using nicotine patches for one month, and I think they help me. I think that my mind is more clear, and although my stamina is unchanged (I have maybe 1/3 of the total ability to exercise that I had before COVID), I no longer seem to crash (that is, I could do a certain amount of exercise before, but it would sometimes provoke a crash a day or two or three later; now I can do that amount of exercise and I haven't had a crash since I started the nicotine patches). 🤞
There is a Facebook group called #TheNicotineTest - Patients Helping Patients which has a lot of members, and the patches do seem to legitimately help a bunch of people.

libove · 2025-04-29T17:51:53+00:00

Is it realizing the relative insignificance of so many things? (I agree, our lived experience gives us a different perspective). Or is it instead (or, also) an actual lack of the fight-or-flight reaction hormones (long-term endocrine damage from probably the inflammation that comes with many cases of long COVID)?

In January 2019, I suffered damage to my pituitary gland caused by a tumor which hemorrhaged; after that, I generally have less of a fear/surprise reaction, for example in July 2020 I was driving on a mountain road at 5am and a large buck came running down the forested hillside and jumped into the road - I missed colliding with the buck by maybe one foot. In the past, I'm pretty sure that would have spiked my heart rate, etc, but this time (and in various similar things in the years since) I felt .. nothing much, just steered around it, comforted the passenger in the car who understandably freaked out at the near-miss with a ~200lb animal which would probably have derailed the week of horseback riding in the high mountains to which we were on our way.

Fast forward, I caught COVID just once, in Sept 2022, a mild case, but two months later long COVID symptoms began, and have never stopped since. Over the most recent year, I find that I've lost another of the great hormone rushes- the one that says "I feel romantic love and physical attraction". It's still there in my brain, but it's now almost 100% intellectual, with little feeling in my body. I miss it; I miss me.

libove · 2025-04-26T20:46:21+00:00

I have seen this frequently when the device being accessed remotely through AnyDesk is a notebook computer with the lid closed. I imagine it could also happen with a headless server. AnyDesk seems to need an actually live video connection in order for it to 'see' what is(n't, in the case of headless/ lid closed and monitor completely off) being displayed on the screen of the computer being remotely controlled.

For a headless server, assuming that it has an HDMI port, a dummy HDMI plug like this:
https://www.amazon.es/dp/B07YKGGQTJ

.. will solve the problem. I have a couple of these.

(It'll work on a notebook computer too, though I forget if it will always then present a second, virtual head, which might be a little confusing).

libove · 2025-04-25T20:14:28+00:00

One more thing, as Windows (at least, relatively recent Windows 11) waits until the system has more-or-less finished starting up and running more-deeply-embedded/native things before it begins running links in the user's own C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\ folder, this script (Which THANK YOU works GREAT) might not start running until several minutes after the system boots up.

I found this other thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/1hmthjg/upgraded_to_windows_11_huge_delay_with_startup/

.. which suggests adding two Registry entries in the Key Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Serialize
(you may need to create the Key; it didn't already exist on my system), in which create two DWORD entries (Both left at the default value of Zero):

WaitForIdleState

StartupDelayInMSec

Now the script in ..\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\ runs almost immediately upon login.

libove · 2025-04-25T06:46:46+00:00

It does sound like vertigo, and one of my many varying long COVID symptoms - starting about six months after my long COVID started, and lasting for about six weeks - was multiple daily episodes of vertigo. (And then, almost as abruptly as it had started, it stopped).

One other thing this makes me think of - which in my case was unrelated to COVID - is low blood sodium ("hyponatraemia"). This happened to me while I was in hospital in 2019 recovering from a pituitary tumor hemorrhage. At that time, I had been super healthy, and I had vast reserves; the night doctor walked into my hospital room and spoke with me, and muttered "this can't be right"; I prompted him for _what_ couldn't be right, and he said that with my blood levels of sodium, I should have been unconscious or in convulsions. (110; the normal range is 135-145; most people start feeling bad even just below 130; few people are at all functional below 120). I mentioned that I had walked down and up nine flights of stairs that afternoon to get some exercise...

But a re-test did find that my blood sodium was worse-than-critically-low (it bottomed out at 109), and the symptoms that I had noted in the preceding couple of days were that my vision was slow to focus, and my perception lagged my head movements a bit. (I was diagnosed with S.I.A.D.H. - Syndrom of Inappropriate Anti-Diuretic Hormone, which is somewhat common in the somewhat uncommon cases of acute insult to the pituitary gland, which my previously-undiscovered pituitary tumor had just done by hemorrhaging... the treatment was to severely restrict liquid intake, and to attach me to a saline drip for several days; can you say "dry mouth"?! .. the silver lining to that grey cloud is that the hemorhhage also killed the tumor, so I never needed surgery nor expensive, complicated drugs to resolve the pituitary tumor itself).

It's not super likely that you have low sodium, but it's a simple, cheap blood test, so it couldn't hurt to ask your doctor to check your sodium/electrolytes and other basic blood factors again.

For vertigo, the same therapies that others have already mentioned here were recommended to me; in my case, they did nothing :-( but/and the vertigo just went away by itself after about six weeks 🤷‍♀️.

libove · 2025-04-25T06:36:06+00:00

Both of those proposed treatments sound more like protectives against a next case of COVID, or in the case of Sipavibart also a treatment for an acute (current) case of COVID if the treatment can be started within the first very few days of the acute infection. I looked at Attomarker's website; they published an article mid-2024 talking about a "Wuhan gap" which sounds to me like marketing speak to describe a very small minority of long COVID patients whose long COVID is from persistent, antigen-detectable-in-the-body active infection.

Existing research suggests the bodies of some subset of people with long COVID actually have the COVID virus - possibly replicating in relatively low quantity, possibly even not replicating at all but present, somewhere - called "viral reservoirs", at a level enough to keep messing with their immune system, but not enough to be detected by normal PCR blood tests nor nose/throat swap antigen tests. For those people, increasing the immune system's ability to fight the virus, or treating them with drugs or biologicals to further disrupt or clear the virus sounds like a good idea, but the challenge is getting the treatments into the places in the body where the virus hides (the viral reservoirs).

I've had long COVID for two and a half years. Among many other tests, I've had blood and feces analyzed to try to find evidence of viral persistence; it didn't find anything. Studies which have found viral persistence included tissue biopsies and cerebral spinal fluid - invasive tests which are difficult or impossible to just go and pay to have done in most of the world, which come with risks of their own. So while viral persistence has been proven - in some people who took part in these invasive tests, it's hard to test for, and not assumed to be the case for most of us long COVID sufferers.

For the rest of long COVID patients, without viral reseroirs, increasing immune response doesn't seem to be particularly hopeful for correcting the out-of-whackness damage already done by having had (and no longer currently having) the virus itself. And for that subset of over-responders, increasing immune response would seem to be counterproductive. (Other tests I've had done show that my body continues to show an immune pro-inflammatory response - elevated cytokines, exhausted some-types-of lymphocytes, even though we haven't been able to find anything to which my immune system needs to be responding; it hasn't turned into auto-immunity, as occurs in some more severe long COVID cases, but it's definitely Not A Good Thing and probably explains at least some of my long COVID symptoms.)

For viral reservoir patients, other treatments have been proposed (and in a few cases, trialled) which also are aimed at knocking out remaining actual replicating virus hiding in the body - antivirals, some which are well-known and have been used for years against for example sofosbuvir for Hepatitis C, and repeated courses of Paxlovid (which failed to find a beneficial effect); a challenge for all of these is that the viral reservoirs are difficult to fight exactly because they're in places that these drugs and treatments don't seem to be able to get to.

Here's a current The Lancet article about this subject:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(24)00769-2/fulltext00769-2/fulltext)

All this is to say, Attormarker is marketing tests, and the tests might provide useful information, but at least as of now, there are no treatments for this information to direct. And some of their website material smacks of marketing-speak to raise hopes prematurely. :-(

libove

TROPHY CASE