Hi everyone. I thought I'd update after having spoken to my GP. My experience on the gel was very strange - while I was experiencing intense anxiety and hot flushes, it did blow away the brain fog I've been feeling for months, and I felt much more myself. After switching back to the patches, the anxiety and flushes relieved, and I had a few days of actually feeling good. This then flattened back into feeling flat, low, foggy and disengaged, even on the slightly increased patch dose.
After speaking to my GP, she still feels I'm not absorbing the patches well or consistently, and thinks my reaction to the gel was that it caused a sudden increase in oestrogen but that my levels were probably uneven throughout the day as I hadn't stablized on the dose yet. We came up with two plans:
Plan A Try Estradot 75 to see if that absorbs better. She wrote me a px but I cannot for love nor money find it anywhere.
So Plan B: Try the gel again but a more gradual transition, ie start with a 50 patch and a squirt of gel and gradually increase the amount of gel.
So I'm trying plan B as of yesterday- aaaaand already getting flushes again, and feeling very tired and low. I think initially the gel's effects are very uneven? And this makes sense to me as presumably it takes a while to build to a stable amount. But we'll see how it goes.
We also discussed testosterone. My GP is prepared to prescribe it, but the issue here is I have previously had a pulmonary embolism caused by a tumour. My understanding is now the tumour is gone my risk of PE is no longer higher than anyone else's, but my GP needs to seek the opinion of an endocrinologist. So she has written to them and we'll see what they say. I hope very much this medical history doesn't make me permanently contra-indicated off T as I really think it will be helpful to me.