[Doll]

Dear god that's a lot of pills. Although thinking on it, right now I'm taking 21 pills a day...If I hadn't stopped taking all my vitamins I'd probably be taking that many. xD Yeah, I wasn't sure how much you drink, so I figured I'd just suggest it at least.

[mochaccino]

I just got my progesterone cream today and I figured I might as well start it immediately. I think I might be estrogen dominant, so a cycle of only PC could be just what I need. It's too bad that I won't really know what my hormonal balance is like until I've done several cycles of BBT charting. There's 10 days left in my current cycle, and I'll be applying PC once a day. BTW, Emerita Pro-gest smells a lot like toothpaste for some reason. Luckily the smell goes away very quickly.

After putting on the cream, I think I finally figured out why Ginnie kept emphasizing that she only used "a little bit" of cream whenever someone asked her about progesterone. Most progesterone creams don't come with a measuring pump, as far as I know. You have to eyeball the amount, but the recommended dose is really tiny, about a 1/4 tsp. It's literally a pea sized amount. I think most people don't intuitively know what a 1/4 tsp looks like, unless they bake on a regular basis, like I used to. Hopefully that really is what Ginnie was trying to get people to understand.

For years I thought that I didn't get any PMS breast swelling at all. After starting BE I realized that I do get a very tiny bit of swelling that I can't even feel. I can only see the faint increase in fullness if I'm paying really close attention. If this progesterone cream works, it should increase my menstrual swelling enough that it'll actually be noticeable for once. If that doesn't happen, I'll be pretty confused.

I need a new AC and haven't received it yet, but it's been over 100 where I live for several days every week. I thinks it's kind of amazing that I haven't died of heat exhaustion :p Snoogling would have been way to uncomfortable, especially since I don't have any padding yet. I'm gonna start snoogling again when I get my padding and AC.

[mochaccino]

I finally looked up some info about the relationship between estrogen and prolactin. Someone on a medical board asked about the relationship between the two, and these are 2 of the responses he or she received:

Reply 1:
"Estrogen promotes prolactin secretion but inhibits its action on the breast (FA 2011 pg 482).

Similarly progesterone also inhibits prolictin's action on the breast. Thus during pregnancy you get increased prolactin produced but only after giving birth (when the hormones start to decrease) does that prolactin actually allow lactation.

I have written in my first aid that its the decline of progesterone specifically that allows lactation."

Reply 2:
"Pathologic correlate - hyperprolactinemic states (such as a pituitary tumor or typical antipsychotics) actually inhibit GnRH, LSH, and FSH release. Therefore it's a highly tested cause of amenorrhea."

While I was reading PM programs, I also saw some rather odd things said about prolactin and some of the herbs that increase prolactin. Ginnie claimed that prolactin increases the number of estrogen receptors, but I wasn't sure that she hadn't confused prolactin with progesterone in that case. Does anyone know if she was right? If so what's the mechanism?

IdreamofD said that she took Goat's rue in order to keep taking PM continuously like she had already been doing for months. I have no idea what she meant by that. She was already taking BC of coarse.

[mochaccino]

Earlier in this thread, Isabelle mentioned MydreamisGcup and IdreamofD's programs as examples of very successful PM programs. At first, I couldn't find enough info in MydreamisGcup's program thread, but later I realised that most of the info about her progress is in her pic thread. Now that I've read her pic thread, I feel I know enough to be as impressed by her growth as everyone else is.

I was very confused about why their programs were so successful compared to the unsuccessful program of a certain other person (who I won't name). From now on I'm gonna call her "B", for no good reason other than that I think it's cute

B took PM along with BC just like MydreamisGcup and IdreamofD. Now I that I reread B's program, I realize that she was not taking it continuously like most BC users would. I don't really know why she chose to cycle it. More importantly, she was taking a progestin-only BC. Her doctor told her that the progestin in her BC is actually very similar to estradiol. I don't know if that really makes her BC unique or not, but she implied that it was very unusual. She seemed to think that the progestin in her BC is much more similar to estradiol than the progestins in other BC's. I'm not sure how progestins of that kind behave in the body, and what it might have done to her homone levels, but she responded very badly to it. She also seems to have suffered lot's of symptoms of estrogen dominance during her program. However, her bust size increased continously and dramatically for a very long time. The increase was so steady and impressive that everyone, including me, was sure that it was growth. At the end, she took a break from all BE and lost absolutely everything within a few weeks. She didn't lose weight, it was all swelling. I'm baffled by what happened to her.

IdreamofD used a normal combined BC, and MydreamisGcup used a progestin-only BC. I think MydreamisGcup's BC might have been very different from B's BC, even thought both were progestin-only, but I don't know nearly enough about how BC's really work.

None of this really answers my question, of course. Now I know that there were important differences between their programs, but I don't know why it caused such a dramatic difference in B's results. Does anyone have any ideas?

[mochaccino]

The PC cream made me feel heavily sedated. I didn't even know that it was a possible side effect. It didn't just make me sleepy, I was so tired that I had a scary experience I haven't had in ages. I don't take sleeping pills any more, but when I first took them as a teenager, I reacted really strongly to them, probably because my system wasn't used to them. The best way I can explain is to say that I felt like I was trapped in sleep.

My experience with PC was just like that, and it doesn't happen all the time. This was maybe the third time it has happened to me ever. I woke up only halfway this morning, but then felt as if I was struggling to move. I tried to claw my way upright, holding the wall but I just kept falling back down. All this time, I was still half asleep, so I kept giving up the fight and then slipping back into dreams that were each a few seconds long. Because I was so upset and feeling trapped, they were mostly nightmares. In one, I imagined that I succeeded in clawing my way out of bed and made it all the way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but when I looked in the mirror my eyes were dark holes. I feel like all this strugging went on for a very long time. In reality it probably took 4 or 5 minutes, which is still waaay to long. Even after fully waking up, I felt as if I had just come out of anesthesia. It's already 3 pm and I still feel really groggy. Not just groggy but zombie like.

I didn't say all that just to complain, even though it really sucked. I wanna know what it means that I'm having such an extremely strong reaction to a 25 mg dose of progesterone. Was my existing progesterone level so low that my body has forgotten what to do with it? Maybe the opposite is true and I'm heavily progesterone dominant. Or maybe it means absolutely nothing, and I'm just going to have deal with the grogginess and night terrors. What on earth is going on?

[Isabelle]

Hi mochaccino,

I think it was too much. Feeling sedated is in the list:
http://livingtherhythm.com/?page_id=60

The dreams are not in the list, and it's strange that you got the exact same feeling as on sleeping pills. Are you sure there's nothing else in the cream that they added to suppress some other side effect? A common side effect is feeling irritated. There may be something in the cream to prevent the irritation turning into aggression.

[mochaccino]

I don't think Emerita has any added sedatives. I do tend to be unusually sensitive to things that have a sedative affect, so this isn't a huge surprise. Right now I'm just hoping I get used to it, and that it doesn't mean that I don't need PC. If I get any other of the symptoms on that list, I'll have to stop using PC for now, and be very careful about how I use it in the future. Right now I don't have any other symptoms.

[Isabelle]

Aha, actually, this is great. You have a symptom that is very sensitive to PC dose. It will help you to tune your program to your natural progesterone cycle and to interactions between PC and herbs.

[mochaccino]

Thanks Isabelle. I hadn't thought of it that way. That really does put a silver lining on it. I remember being desperate to feel any sort of symptoms from my previous herbal program, but changing doses never seemed to affect me differently, so I felt like I had nothing to go on.

Then again, this symptom will be a useful indicator only if I'm fairly sure what it means. What confuses me is that menopausal women sometimes get sleepy from PC, even though they take it for low progesterone. I'm sure the exact hormone imbalance during menopause varies from woman to woman. What I'd really like to know is if this ever happens to menopausal women who are estrogen dominant, but have relatively healthy overall estrogen levels (not too high or low except in relation to other hormones), and who also have low progesterone.

BTW, I've been wondering whether there's a record of Ginie's PC program outside of her main PM program thread on this board. In her PM program she mentions growing on only PC for a few months, but doesn't get into as much detail as I would like. Does anyone know if there's a better record of her previous experiences somewhere? Maybe it's on the old board or a completely separate board.

There's also one more thing I've been wondering about. Probably the only assertion that I've made on this thread that I'm absolutely sure of is that very, very few women grow when they use PC unopposed. I wonder what it says about Ginie's hormone levels that she was able to grow on PC alone, assuming it really was growth. I also can't keep ignoring the fact that, before starting her PM program, Ginie had some sort of hormonal symptoms bad enough for her to do BBT for months and bring it in to her gynecologist in the hopes of getting some kind of hormone treatment. She doesn't get into the details about what led her to do that, but I do know she started BBT charting long before starting her PM program. She did say that, when she finally convinced her doctor to test her hormone levels, the results said she only had slightly low levels of both estrogen and progesterone. It might be significant that she had already been treating herself with PC for months. What should I make of all this

[mochaccino]

I think that I'm going to post a new program page once I start my PM program in a week or so. It'll probably be much less confusing that way. It's a little sad that it will be my third program page, not including the 2 program pages I started and then almost immediately abandoned on the noogleberry forum years ago. In any case, I'm still feeling really excited and optimistic about this new program

I think my program is just about locked in at this point. I feel fairly sure about what I'm going to take, but I'm still unsure about how to decide when to take PC. Does anyone have any extra tips about how to decide when to take it, based on BBT charting and/or symptoms?

I've been trying to find more info on people who cycled PM along with FG and/or the Greenbush combo. Especially if they were also using PM cream throughout the month. I think there might be one or two on Wahaika's board, but I'm not sure. If I remember correctly, someone on this board might have even cycled it with Wonderup. If you know of anyone doing this, please let me know.

I also just remembered that, a while ago, someone was imitating the ingredients of Supershine by taking lamb placenta along with collagen, papaya enzymes, and maybe a vitamin or two. I wonder if she ever got any hormonal symptoms or even growth from the placenta, since she was not taking other hormonal supplements, as far as I can remember. I'm going to try to see if I can find her old program myself, but if anyone can link me to it, please let me know.