Symptoms: Akathisia, brain zaps, emotional blunting, sexual dysfunction, cognitive impairment, insomnia, depersonalization/derealization, suicidal ideation, tinnitus, neuropathy, severe anxiety/panic, muscle/joint pain, GI disturbances, osteoporosis, muscle atrophy, genital atrophy, watery semen, loss of height
I first took finasteride for a month two years ago. When I first took it, I immediately got severe ball pain and muscle aches spanning everywhere on my body.. People who get these side effects normally say that you need to adjust, and since I was young and desperate, I stayed on it. I took it MWF, and I eventually stopped at the end of the month when I realised I wasn’t getting any better at tolerating it. I noticed my libido didn’t come back after a few days, and then I woke up feeling very panicked.
My genitals developed hard flaccid, and I was having panic attacks a lot. It didn’t stop. I then developed a lot of infections after this, fungal infections everywhere, basically on my feet, groin, face, and hair. I was crying all the time, my head pressure was so immense that if I got up and moved I would throw up straight away. My skin had gotten super loose, and I can stretch it maybe 3 inches away from my face. My jaw had completely shrunk, my enamel eroded, and my gums had receded significantly. My teeth became loose and I was very scared I would lose my teeth. I couldn’t walk or bend, my bones demineralised to the point where I have a dent in the back of it, my joints went completely hypermobile, and I have no blood flow anywhere, no vascularity at all so I am freezing 24/7. I lost my pubic hair, and all my facial hair. My DEXA scans show osteoporosis in my spine, and osteopenia in my hip. My gut doesn’t move or digest anything, when I first crashed I didn't have a bowel movement for 3 weeks, so food sits and ferments and now I have SIBO, candida and psoriasis as a result from the inflammation in my gut. My skin is so thin and fragile it's also completely numb 100%, my vision is completely decimated and I lost a lot of my hearing. I lost two inches of height, and all the muscle on my body from head to toe has completely wasted away. Any intervention crashes me and makes me lose even more bone. I haven’t been able to leave my house since I crashed two years ago now, I spent 6 months bedbound and improved a little bit but I have plateaued somewhere around 10% of my former self. The people who had my severity of symptoms have then gone on to kill themselves, this is the hope I have to push forward on.
I can’t love anyone anymore, I cannot even have love for my own parents. I enjoyed music so much before this and now it just sounds like noise. I was going to go to university, I was going to have relationships and now all opportunity of that is gone. I have nothing now, absolutely nothing, I feel as if my brain hasn’t developed at all and maybe it's even regressed a lot since. I don’t have any confidence, I can’t look anyone in the eye anymore, I WISH all I had was sexual sides, I would cut my own genitals off so I could go back to who I was before this. My life now over. I’m certain 100% that there is no ‘treatment’ that can fix this, I am SO suicidal and depressed, this body and my mind isn’t mine anymore. I had my neck in a noose too many times I can count and all this time and I’ve been too pussy to kill myself since I am religious and I’m scared I’ll go to hell. Maybe one day I’ll fully commit to it, but for now I will just sit on my computer and wait until I lose enough faith in god.
No doctor can help me, they just think it's in my head, and when I show them these changes they say maybe it's deconditioning, and I need to be on an SSRI. My family don’t believe me either, they just think I am doing this on purpose. It’s not fucking fair, it’s a waste of life, I never even got to start it for fucks sake, I had dreams and it was all ruined because Merck wanted to LIE about data.