1 July 2011
Got to get this off my chest, and then I can move on to not obsessing about it.
Recently I started a series of ambiguous tweets regarding something going on with my health. I made the mistake of making an initial post on Facebook, to which my wife chastised me for leaving people who genuinely care about my health in the dark in such a public forum. That was not well-thought, and for that I apologize. This generation’s expression has been that of a sharing nature, and there’s nothing truer than that when it comes to health issues.
Some find health issues a bit precarious and quite taboo. I’ve been blessed (or, so I thought, but that will be explored here in later posts.) with what I’ve considered good health. Or so I think. When someone posts the random detritus to social media (“I’m hungry,” “Blah blah,” etc), the overall value of the information drops immensely. When someone speaks to their illness, if they’re just a casual acquaintance that has access to your stream-of-online-consciousness, then there is the collective bristle of attention-seeking.
I state all this at the front, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m looking for sympathy. Frankly, I’m a bit embarrassed about what I’m diagnosed with, but in two days after my first treatment, I have a vigor and vitality about me that can almost bring me to tears. I’ve teased this for some time, because I didn’t want to speak to it until I knew treatments worked. I wanted to get further along in the diagnosis and treatment process before I championed the cause and had any reflection on the matter.
So. I, at almost 30 years old (and most likely much earlier), have low testosterone. Or, as my inner twelve-year-old snickers at every time I say or read it, the formal name is ‘hypogonadism.’ Ha!
I’m embarrassed to say that outright in a public forum with my name attached to it, but the more I read about the topic, the more I read about the science, theory, and biology of the evolving man, the more I’ve thought this topic should be pushed to the forefront of men’s health. In more posts, I plan on talking more to the stigma, treatment, and, of course, catalog the results of treatment. There’s not a lot of heterosexual male dialogue about the issue outside of weightlifting and men’s health forums. My goal with this is to catalogue the treatment, the experience, and make a point about something I never knew existed until 2 weeks ago. I’ve got too much information for one post, so I’m going to break it up into smaller, more easily digested posts on specific aspects of this quirky illness. I hope to exorcise the demons here, and at the same time, I hope it helps anyone who comes across this better understand what they’re going through.
It’s been a crazy two weeks of studying intensely a topic I scoffed at when the doctor first made such a preposterous suggestion. It was either that, a series of less-embarrassingly-named ailments, or leukemia. So there’s that.
(Note: by the time this publishes, I'll be 5 days into my first injection of Depo-Testosterone.)