Unfortunately for me the tablets made me violently sick. This happens in quite a few cases and I found that I couldn’t take the tablets. So the next stage would be patches, these are Andropatches that go on your skin. I don’t wish to criticise a drug, but I found that when I was having my blood tests, and they were testing my testosterone levels in my blood whenever I was using the patches, even with two patches which is double the dose, I found that my testosterone readings were below the minimum that could be recorded by the machines that measure the amount of hormone. Also there is a very large problem with regard to the testosterone patches. I have very, very hairy skin as you can see, you have to have totally smooth skin for the patches; patches will not adhere to hair, so you’re then using things like the adhesive sticky tape to hold the patches down. The patches aren’t effective, I’m not saying that they won’t work for everybody but I found them an absolute waste of time and then I was beginning to suffer the HRT symptoms, I wasn’t getting enough hormones.

The pellets are meant to last 3 to 4 months, [but] after about 3 to 4 weeks I found that I was getting an infection under the skin, and my body was actually rejecting the pellets. My antibodies were doing a brilliant job of rejecting the pellets that were placed in my thigh, the pellets would be literally pushed to the surface by some chemical means that I’m not aware of and they would burst the stitches or the scar and come out in an infected mess. So I then had a wound infection for about 2 to 3 weeks afterwards. After 3 or 4 months of that it was obvious that the pellets were not working for me, so we went onto the final 2 types of things that were available. One is an injection of a very, very slow dissolving compound which is, it’s very oily and thick based and that is injected again into my thigh…

It was done over 10 to 12 minutes; again they have to give you a local anaesthetic and it is inserted, I mean a needle like this I have never seen, the needle, no joke, is about that long, that they push into your thigh and then they inject this oily goo into the area under the muscle. I found the same things as with the pellets, after a time the oily stuff would come to the surface and again I would have a wound infection.

Now I was, I found that at the beginning I was having injections of this Virormone into my thigh, once every 3 days, the whole vial which is 2mls, which is a hell of a lot. And I was actually overdosing on testosterone. Now initially some of the guys might think, oh brilliant, you know overdosing on testosterone you’ll be, you’ll be running wild. It doesn’t work that way guys, unfortunately it really doesn’t. You develop something called polycythaemia. Polycythaemia is where your red cells are affected by too much testosterone, they become irregular, mutated and you start to feel really ill. Now when I say ill I mean you get light headedness, you feel as if you want to be sick, you get dizzy, you get tired, so although you’re thinking your whole body is being bathed in testosterone you get too much and it gets nasty. The only way that they treat polycythaemia is, because polycythaemia is very similar to leukaemia in the way that it works on the cells, but polycythaemia works on the red cells, is that they use a chemotherapy drug called hydroxyurea which is very nasty. You don’t want to get involved with hydroxyurea and you don’t, really don’t want to want to OD [overdose] on testosterone. If you’re self-injecting then you need to be very careful that you don’t give yourself too much.