Greetings all, first of all I want to thank the effort put by CD and others in the community for this space, and please excuse me before hand for english is not my native language.

Thank you again for this space, for when I crashed in august of last year most of the feedback I got from other online forums was really, really negative. As for doctors,generally speaking they think it is mostly in ones head and just offer a pharmaceuticals "solutions". Hopefully more and more people will be directed here and avoid to fall into despair pits that are not even worth to mention.

Anyways, my story short. I am almost 28 yo and. around 2014 I wen't to the derm because of my thinning hair. He prescribed fin and told me it had 0 sides, however I did my research and decide I was not gonna risk it. Bought then other stuff in the prescription (shampoos, minox, tonics, etc) but not the fin and decide that I would reduce the DHT by other means ie: saw palmetto, green tea extract, pumpkin seed oil ( how fool I was)

So fast forward to 2016, besides some ocasional lethargy, brain fog and eye floaters I had no other symptoms that can recall, and was doing really good in the sexual department. That year a lot of good things happened; professionally and personally I was doing good and life eventually got so busy that I forgot to take all the hair related stuff for around 1 week and then it happened.

Friday 19 of august of 2016
The Crash:

That morning I was taking a shower and noticed all of the sudden there was no response down there not even by manual stimuli. That was the beginning of a lot of symptoms that I would not write here but mainly I was dealing with ED, Insomnia.

Remember I told you I bought from the derm the shampoos, etc?. well when I was tossing in the trash cursing all that stuff among with the supplements I made an awful discovery: reading the composition tab of the minoxidil bottle it displayed also "finasteride 0.025%" A chill went down my spine and the bullet I thought that I had dodged had got me and in reality I was exposed to it for at least 2 and a half years. Add to that those natural dht suppressors and a couple of isotretoinie cycles for acne that I took in my early 20's ( I came to discover that there are isotretoinin users that develop something similar to pfs, apparently it hurts your dht as well) anyway at that point I thought my life was over.

Time went by and the symptom that improved the most was insomnia, (it took about 4 months to stabilize and I was able to sleep 6 hours without aids which compared to the first months was huge progress).

Here I want to warn people not to throw away the progress they have achieved by doing silly things, in January I started to use (maybe it was more an abuse) cannabis. And while it helped a lot to temporary relieve some of the symptoms ( most of all mood), the insomnia kicked in hard again ( if I was under the influence I could sleep like a baby but if not then maybe 3 hours tops) the lesson is to cherish your progress and don't toss it away, for any miss step like alcohol, a weekend of bad diet or in this case abusing weed can lead to a huge leap backwards. ( from what I have researched cannabis depletes the magnesium in the brain)

Anyways as for today I have some few good days and some bad, in general I feel that have improved a bit but I am still far from a recovery. In two weeks from today I will start the cleanse and commit 110% on the protocol.

I can definitely tell you that whatever this is, is gut related. You see on my third month after the crash, one night I ate some oatmeal and cinnamon before bed. That night I woke up at 4 am with the worst stomach cramps, turns out the cinnamon was long expired. So, I made some tea and eventually could rest, the thing was that the next morning I woke up not only feeling relieved but with a iron wood, the kind of wood get so hard you actually feel a little pain, the kind of wood that was normal before all this.

Heading now to a full recovery, will keep you updated through the protocol.

Some final words: sometimes I think this condition is kind of a sentence, we are doing sentence and our offense was our vanity. But we can get out of this prison guys, it can be long term, short term but it ain't for life and in the most part is up to us. This experience is really hard but remember that diamonds are made from the hardest pressures on earth.

This experience will make you face with who you are, and can grow out of it to came out a better man, both body and mind. We came into this mess like a vain boys, but will come out like the men we are meant to be.
As Churchill once said: " if you are going through hell, keep walking"

Keep walking guys, we can conquer this.