Congrats on finding a telehealth provider. I don’t want to deter you but I wouldn’t expect ‘normalcy’ right away LOL. HRT for perimenopause and menopause is largely about mitigating symptoms; you can supplement E and P to maintain a baseline but as your ovaries gasp their last, they’ll still toss out hormones haphazardly, and you may still feel those effects, although hopefully not as intensely.
I did start 5mg/day DHEA a week ago, and don’t really feel anything much different. I have labs again in a few weeks and will reassess at that point.
I’ve always been pretty sensitive to the progestins in birth control, and dealt with I WILL F*CKING MURDER YOU due to that, while I was on BC for nearly two decades. Last decade my cycles have been blessedly normal, and with the addition of T a few years ago (and losing 30lbs, and scrubbing my diet squeaky clean, and hitting the gym for 1.5 hours 6 days a week), my cycles are very light and manageable, although they’re retarded frequent (21 days instead of 28). Anyway, point of all that is, I added E a few months ago for some of the GSM stuff in peri, and it HAS solved that stuff nearly 100%, which is awesome. But the requirement for P to oppose that added E has me experiencing that cyclical rage all over again, and it’s pretty wild, especially now that it’s a whole week every three weeks, basically.
Based on that, I’m going to take most recent labs to my Midi NP when I see her next, and my experience, and ask if I can up E *or* lower P. At the moment, I’m playing around with whether or not taking P vaginally/rectally vs orally makes any difference. Anecdotally, it does, for many women, and those micronized P capsules are designed to be taken any of those three routes. But if I could go without the damned P, I totally would. Hate hate hate it, although it does seem to have helped with sleep (although maybe the E solving urinary issues just means I can sleep instead of waking up to pee all night LOL).
I highly recommend telyrx dot come, it’s a great place to have backups on hand just in case. I ended up NEEDING those backups when my local pharmacy didn’t get my rx filled in time, last time.
