Dani's Rebel Log

Lab Results

I got my ferritin up from 34 to 57 in two months of supplementing consistently with heme iron. That’s pretty good progress. The goal is to get it above 100 and stay there for a year.

The “normal” range is anywhere from 15-150 which will always seem insane to me. Normal does not equal optimal.

Testosterone Lab Results

My testosterone is hardly going up. When I hear female professionals in the hormone and health space talk about their total testosterone, they’re up in the 80-100 ng/dL range. Granted, some of them seem to have altered their voices, but I think there’s some room for me to go higher without that effect.

Also the doctor who wrote this article says:

So… my measly 18 ng/dL seems bizarrely low. How am I alive and not a melting puddle of goo?

To make things more complicated is the free-T. The nurse practitioner I’m working with says that’s a more important number. But what is the optimal free-T range for women? There’s no reference interval under my results and everything online says something different.

To make the already complicated things even more complicated is SHBG. The higher yours is, the more it prevents you from using testosterone. Well, mine is low. It’s a fraction of what I’ve been hearing about when high-T women discuss their hormones.

So maybe that’s a good thing and it means I’m using testosterone more efficiently. If that’s the case, maybe I’m supposed to have low-ish testosterone levels.

Who knows? Everything is weird.

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