Associate Member
Hi all,
Been on TRT for 11 years now and I am 62 years old now.
My Hematocrit is at 51.5 (Quest <51) and at
52.1 (Kaiser <51)
Hemoglobin at 18.1 (Quest <17.1)
(Kaiser 17.1 <17)
Should I donate blood at this point and if so, whole blood or double reds.
I don’t know what the latest protocols are regarding this in case there have been changes.
Last edited by ctenosaura; 05-08-2025 at 11:42 AM.
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
I would probably go with a whole blood and plan to donate again in 56 days. Really focus on water intake.
I'm 60 and the last thing I do before I go to sleep is down 500ml of water and the first thing I do when I get up is down another 500ml. Also I keep a big jug of water with me at work.
If something changes and your Doctor scripts a therapeutic phlebotomy in addition to your donations, make sure you monitor your iron via an iron panel including ferritin. It seems us older guys can tank our ferritin easily and it's a royal pain to bring it back within the normal range while maintaining your H&H at normal values.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
Associate Member
Thanks AG ����
Knowledgeable Member
This info should be stickied somewhere!Originally Posted by almostgone
Associate Member
Is there anything else to do to deal with HCT besides donations?
I'm on nebido every 9 weeks and currently my hemoglobin is 17 and hct is 52%?
I tried IP6 from supolements but it didn't do a lot for me
My RBC is 6.13 from a blast that ended in beggining of february, thrombocites are at 241.
I can't take grapefruit seed extract due to prozac, i saw it interacts and ain't recommended..
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
Some guys swear they have good results from nattokinase, but I tried it and never saw any benefit.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
That might be a project some of older guys could work on, Cy. Maybe @Kel could throw in some of his experience as well.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
Associate Member
IP6 works, if you take it on an empty stomach, although i've read research that says secondary polycithemia isn't dangerous as primary.
What's the threshold in yoir opiniom for hct and hgb? Some labs moved the upper normal to 54%
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
I already have a genetic clotting disorder, so I do my best to stick to the 51% value for the upper end of the range for
HCT. My Dr.r. usually doesn't like to see me consistently in the 53% + area
Mine has been higher, but I just plain feel better if I keep it at/under 51%. Much beyond that and I just feel winded all of the time.
Personally, I think high HCT and high platelet levels are even more of a danger.
Last edited by almostgone; 05-18-2025 at 12:52 AM.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
Associate Member
I have issues in the place i'm currently at that I have to speak local language fluently in order to donate which is retarded.
So i skipped a whole year and ended up at 53% although that was in the morning dehydrated..
Then i donated and dropped to 49%, but i manage to do it like twice per year..i need it 3-4 times in reality.
Although I'd suggest you try grape seed extract and IP6, helped me a lot to slow it down, but i had to quit cause im starting prozac in 2 days and DR advised against these supps.
Another weird issue i have recently..my morning bp is 124-130/76-80, with pulse 62. Did ekg and echo all perfect, 0 hyperthrophy.
Im the evening after work i jump to 139-147/80-82, i can't relax..for the context i had covid in january, i feel like my whole nervous system is fired up, could it be due to stress? As soon as i take GABA 500mg and l theanine 100mg i drop to 132/80..
Knowledgeable Member
What is your concern about donating? You can't be afraid of needles...
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
Sounds like you need to address some stress in regards to your higher BP in the evening. With that being said, mine is always higher after work. I usually just check BP when I first wake up and occasionally after work. Do a Google search for "box breathing" and try that in the evenings. I usually go through the process for several minutes and it helps me ramp down.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
Associate Member
I love needles! Ouch that came out wrong lol.
But seriously, everytime i get near one i get bigger, what a weird side effect..joke aside, the issue is with the local red cross and them not accepting English..i have to know perfect German in order to donate (retarded right?). In case you don't believe me, just check austrian red cross, you'll see ..it's the law basically. Sometimes i scramble trough with my broken German lol
Associate Member
Yeah it's fine when i wake up, but yea i got a lot of stress, thats why im starting prozac, it's reflecting on my body way too much
Knowledgeable Member
I've been studying blood vector doping products and their side effects pretty intensely since 2006. Nineteen years later I have yet to find a single verifiable case of someone dying from too many red blood cells, or from taking too much EPO. And EPO is intended to stimulate bone marrow into creating abnormal amounts of RBCs, so for the better part, whenever I write "too much EPO," you can substitute "too many red blood cells" and it still would be true.
Lance Pharmstrong's dope doctor was an Eye-Tie named Michelle Ferrari. In the early EPO era, Ferrari probably was the top authority on blood vector doping in the sports world. In 1994, which was a few years before he hooked up with Pharmstrong, he said in a press interview, "EPO is not dangerous, its abuse is. It is also dangerous to drink ten liters of orange juice." This got dumbed down to 'Ferrari says, EPO is no more dangerous than orange juice.' Which is a mischaracterization of what Ferrari said, but it is true nonetheless. World-wide there have been tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of athletes in the most arduous endurance sporting events on earth (most notably bicycle roadracing and cross-country skiing) competing with EPO-driven hematocrit levels of +/-60, and none of them died from anything attributable to the EPO or an extraordinarily high RBC count.
The shit-storm surrounding Ferrari's claim prompted one sports reporter to investigate what was really going on with EPO. He wrote a book about what he uncovered titled, "Spitting in the Soup," which is the Sunday School version of "Pissing in the Post Toasties," because that's what he was doing. His book pisses all over the notion that EPO (which equals high hematorcrit) is dangerous. There's a review of the book with a lot of relevant details here.
Th author of the book echos my experience: "My own search of medical literature finds plenty of warnings about the dangers of too much EPO. And there are many examples of pharma?ceutical companies paying physicians kickbacks to overdose patients, a process that inadvertently accelerates the growth of deadly tumors. However, I found no documented instances of EPO killing already healthy humans, athletes or otherwise."
And EPO = high Hct.
The book mentions two heart attack patients who were hospitalized in South Korea. Both smoked cigarettes, one had high blood pressure and was diabetic. Both already had one foot in the grave. Their doctor prescribed 33,000 IUs of EPO but instead they were given 318,000. That's a 960% overdose.
Nothing happened. They had ZERO untoward symptoms that could be attributed to a MASSIVE overdose of EPO.
Eero M?ntyranta was a Finnish cross-country skier. He came from a family with a genetic mutation that caused them all to have an abnormally-high Hct. He competed with a natural Hct of 60-65. He also won three Olympic gold medals and two world championships. And he lived to be 76.
I'm knocking on 70 years old. My walking-around Hct runs about 54-56 because I'm on UGL Sustanon and gray market hCG. I bicycle 4-5000 miles a year and I figure EPO would be a waste of money because of what the gear does to my Hct. My PCP looks at me like I must be lying when I tell her I NEVER run out of breath. When I'm cycling, my legs ALWAYS give out before I run out of breath because my Hct is so high. So I understand why EPO once dominated cycling (and probably still does).
What I don't tell her is that I stop taking all the gear two months before an appointment with her to let my Hct get back under 52. Because their protocol is to treat everyone with an Hct higher than that for polycythemia. Except the danger from polycythemia isn't from the Hct. All pathological causes of polycythemia also increase the platelet count, and high platelet count is a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. But steroids aren't pathological. Neither gear nor EPO has an effect on platelet count, so it is completely misplaced to associate high Hct from TRT with polycythemia, yet they do it because the medical community has its collective head up its ass about AASs. And I know from experience that if they test me and my Hct is too high, they'll cut back on my TRT. Which is why resorted to a UGL source when I already was receiving TRT from my PCP.
If I haven't put you to sleep yet, I got on my soapbox about this once before back in 2018 here. Bottom line, I'm betting my life that high Hct (as long as it isn't 99%) is not just harmless, it's beneficial.
AR-Platinum Elite- Hall of Famer
Good to see you, Beetlegeuse. Some of us just plain feel better with a HCT value that isn't much over the low '50s.
Personally, I do feel that the real danger is high platelet levels and high HCT values as I posted above.
There are 3 loves in my life: my wife, my English mastiffs, and my weightlifting....Man, my wife gets really pissed when I get the 3 confused...
A minimum of 100 posts and 45 days membership required for source checks. Source checks are performed at my discretion.
Knowledgeable Member
Beetlegeuse Beetlegeuse Beetlegeuse
There, the incantation is complete! Don't be a stranger, brother!
There are currently 2 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 2 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote