My Hemoglobin goes up to 18 and 19. My Hematocrit goes up to 54 or 57 even when drinking 6 glasses of water prior to the blood test.
My local blood center allows for a regular blood donation once per month. With a double-red blood donation you have to wait four months before you can donate again, even if you return for a regular donation.
My question is which is better to do on an ongoing basis to try and keep Hemoglobin and Hematocrit values lower? A double-red donation once every four months or a regular blood donation once every month?
Thanks
I believe the best is to find the cause of a problem instead of regular donations. Donations can crash your ferritin and that is the worst feeling i have ever had. It’s basically like having covid for a month.
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in the same boat essentially. HCT goes to 19 or so (but then stops)
been donating every 2 months. ferritin is 73
i don’t think this is a solution. donating is probably good 2x a year or so anyways.
i recently switched my T protocol to daily T prop. will see
I’m trying to figure that out. I wasn’t sure if breath holding during lifting could contribute. I lift four times a week for about 2hrs each time. My body could respond to low oxygen created by breath holding and crank out red blood cells like someone with untreated sleep apnea.
I also drink 4 energy drinks a day so my intake of B vitamins is enormous. I saw someone with anemia needs to make sure they get enough B vitamins and I’m getting super human doses of B vitamins.
I watched a video about TRT and blood clots and the person said a high red blood cell count alone wasn’t an issue by itself and that high platelets along with a high red blood cell count was. The platelets are what causes clotting I think. Perhaps donating red blood cells along with platelets may be a better choice. I can’t find an answer anywhere.
There is more and more mechanistic evidence to suggest RBSc could independently form a thrombus, but I don’t know how practical this information is anyway: your blood has both.
Think of RBCs as a bunch of trucks on the road and the platelets as the commuters. The trucks effectively narrow the road just by being there. The more there are, and the slower they go, the less room there is for the platelets to get around - this eventually causes a traffic gym. Red blood cells also activate platelets (which is the form that makes them stick to one another and really clot). I guess in my genius analogy above maybe that’s a truck hitting its breaks and a platelet wrecks, sliding into another lane and hitting another platelet and it wrecks, and eventually you have a blocked road.
Medications will target either pathway: traditionally doctors tend to go after platelets first (think aspirin or Plavix), but following an event like a stroke or DVT, you’ll typically see a patient on a blood thinner targeting thrombin. There are now indications for putting patients on both (like aspirin and Rivaroxaban), but I think most physicians would still be hesitant. Our analogy falls apart in this case, because there’s pretty big risks to not having enough vehicles on our arterial “roads”.
I don’t know if any of that is practical in terms of whether TRT-induced HCT should be considered in the same “vein” (totally on purpose) as pathologically-induced, but just wanted to help clarify.
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