I’m a trans woman, and I’ve been experiencing pretty annoying levels of nausea recently – like, daily, for a few months. It’s not too disruptive, but I get hungry really sporadically, and I spend the rest of the time feeling vaguely queasy. I’m wondering if it’s at all related to the drug cocktail I’m on.
I’ve been on HRT for about 2 years now. I take estradiol (4 mg/day orally) and spironolactone (100 mg/day). I get my hormone levels checked regularly at a clinic. The spiro used to be 50 mg/day, but I had to up the dose after my testosterone levels started creeping back up several months ago.
The T uptick seemingly coincided with when I started taking bupropion for depression. My T levels are back in range, and I’ve since switched out the bupropion for lamotrigine (a mood stabilizer). But now I have all this nausea.
Despite what I’ve described, my HRT prescriber and my psychiatrist both insist that this drug combination shouldn’t be causing nausea, nor the jump in T levels. So, it’s a mystery, and quite a frustrating one. I feel like I’m a big bag of pills that’s been shaken up until it’s good and dizzy.
Not sure if anyone can relate to this – how many depressed trans women are there out there, anyway? But if you have any advice, I’m all ears.
I’ve been experiencing pretty annoying levels of nausea recently – […] I’m wondering if it’s at all related to the drug cocktail I’m on.
Yes, very likely. Nausea is often a symptom of you-body-goes-through-some-change-that-your-brain-can’t-keep-up-with-and-that-leads-to-nausea. I guess it will pass once your transition is complete and your mind has adopted to the new body configuration.
You can look at it like hardware/software. The hardware changes, but the software is still the same. So the software doesn’t keep up with the hardware, and that leads to minor bugs and inconveniences. Sensory data gets reported in a skewed way, and all that leads to nausea, which is a generic way of your brain telling you “i don’t know wtf is going on”.
