The sad fact is that very little bio-medical research has been done on the results and optimal regimen for either FTMs or MTFs. For the most part your doctor, pretty much no matter who they are, is reading labs to indicate to them that you are falling into a normal range for non-transitional human beings.
They generally prescribed based on keeping your blood E level in the low-to-mid range levels of what a menstruating female would show on a blood test at ovulation if you're MTF and I'm not at all sure what sort of range they would look at for the guys.
Post SRS/GCS they will drop you, usually, to a post-menopausal level. In other words, you are being treated according to the lab protocols that would be in effect for someone who has two ovaries and adrenal glands producing estrogen around the clock.
When she says she believes that estrogen may have played a role in the deaths she's telling you the absolute truth, I suspect. That she believes that. It's a guess, hunch, fear of hers, not something that is necessarily factual.
Most doctors are going to go for lower ranges because they do not know and seldom do loads of research to find what sorts of regimen tend to be most effective for most women and men. And that's just the abject truth.
This is why it is soooo important to do your own research to at least be able to provide the doctor, yes, even experienced endos, with info that you can find through net searches. You can never do enough research on the drugs you'll be taking.
Just stop and consider this. How many girls do you know who, without high levels of testosterone, begin puberty at age 12 and are post-menopausal by age 14? Now how many MFTs can you find who have had exactly that experience. Yet, that is SOP for most doctors who work with us.
Does it not sound ludicrous on the face of it?
If you are showing no signs of liver, prolactin or any other anomalies that would indicate you are getting "too much estrogen" then I would say you need to argue with your doctor and be able to provide her with some sort of evidence that might alleviate her own fears.
What she's told you that you have related here just is not making sense to me at all. No, I am not a medical professional but I can follow an argument reasonably well. And something smells rotten in Denmark. But not with just your doc, with the field in general. I wonder how many of them have ever thought about a 2 year puberty-to-post-menopause life and how that might affect a body.
Way too many post-ops complain of tiredness, lack of sex drive, etc.... Does it dawn on the docs that they give higher estrogen doses to post-menopausal natal females to combat some of those very symptoms? Now why would someone who operated for years with a high-testosterone level in her body need just two years of estrogen therapy at lower doses?
Puh-leez.
Nichole
