- specifically Cyproterone Acetate, but also Spironolactone or any other anti-androgen I might not have heard of.
I took Cyproterone for 6 days last December, stopped after feeling unwell and still nearly a year later don't feel right. After two or three days on it I felt great. Since I was 16 I feel like I've lived life through a wall of sweat and anxiety. The simplest things like paying for something in a shop and my back in particular would be drenched in sweat, even if I wasn't aware of feeling anxious. Sorry its a bit gross but it might be important. After 2 or 3 days on the Cyproterone I felt amazing. That stopped completely. I also felt so much calmer and comfortable doing things around people when before there would always be an uncomfortableness and tenseness. Other things I noticed early on was on odd kind of dry feeling in my hands that seemed to come from the inside out and an odd smell and taste in my mouth.
On the 6th day this relaxed feeling continued to the point where it felt really strange. I went to the gym and after running for a bit I did some sprints on a treadmill. This would normally be the time when I would feel a surge of adrenaline. That day I felt so oddly calm. I was pushing my body to the limit and yet mentally I felt like I could nod off into a nice relaxed sleep.
Later that day I had three orgasms in probably around 10 hours, including 2 during the night. Again sorry for bringing up this stuff but it might be important. It was the first time I had done so while taking the Cyproterone and it felt massively different to normal. I would describe it as a pleasurable build up to a point as normal and then a feeling of jamming in my head as it happened. It had been a bit of a problem for me and something that I was hoping the medication would help with and also give me some clarity as to the nature of my gender related feelings. Anwyay I mention it because it was a bodily sensation that felt massively different on the mediaction as opposed to how it usually felt. Then in the early hours of the morning I woke in the night feeling scarily bad. There's almost too much to list but some of the symptoms included loss of feeling in my hands and feet. Hot and cold patches all over my body, a rumbling gargling sensation in my chest and stomach, pain in my chest and stomach, a weird pulsing that seemed to emanate from my veins in different spots, and scariest of all an odd sensation in my head. It was like a feeling of weakness that flashed from my head down through my chest. The best way to describe it would be that it felt as though the connection between my head and body was going to just cut out. Really scary.
I proceeded to feel absolutely horrible for about a month ie on the verge of death I'm not kidding. Every Dr I saw just told me it was generalized anxiety. Things improved a lot after that initial month and then after 4 or 5 months a little better still but since then not much has changed. I still get loads of odd feelings in my head and body and it gets worse during any kind of exercise. I'm more or less dealing with it now but I still feel that something has drastically changed in my body and that I can't do anything too streunous or something goes completely haywire. It also feels worse on alcohol or caffeine.
Anyway, I'm really hoping it was just an extreme shock to the body to be deprived of testosterone which is taking a while to go away. This is why I would like to know what other peoples bodies felt like on an anti-androgen. I wondered about cortisol related conditions because of how the Cyproterone interacts with the brain but so far one neurologist diagnosed as anxiety, an endocrinologist tested adrenal function and gave me the all clear, (he didn't test for cortisol levels. I didn't ask him too, I just wanted to tell him my symptoms and see what conclusion he came to) and another neurologist ordered a head MRI but again more just as a precaution. I've yet to get the results of that.