Pituitary Tumor, Testosterone, Gynecomastia, Misc.
I have another blog, What’s a Delmer Look Like, that I’ve recently started cleaning up a bit. This post is one of the first, possibly the first that mentioned my gynecomastia. It was posted shortly before my gyno surgery.
Take a look at this blog’s INDEX if you’re looking for posts by category.
Originally posted on April 23rd, 2006
I treat everyone I meet as if they know everything about me. It keeps my life simple. I never have to wonder if you know that I’ve been up to something I’d rather you not know about.
With that in mind, some of the following might fall into the Too-Much-Information category for some readers. It might help others.
Oh, and please don’t read any poor Delmer into any of this. I don’t feel that way. I’m happy to have answers and solutions.There’s no whining.
Searching for Prolactinoma at The Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases Information Service reveals:
Autopsy studies indicate that 25 percent of the U.S. population have small pituitary tumors. Forty percent of these pituitary tumors produce prolactin, but most are not considered clinically significant. Clinically significant pituitary tumors affect the health of approximately 14 out of 100,000 people.
(Emphasis mine)
So the odds of having a pituitary tumor that causes problems are pretty small.
At the same site we also find:
In men, the most common symptom of prolactinoma is impotence. Because men have no reliable indicator such as menstruation to signal a problem, many men delay going to the doctor until they have headaches or eye problems caused by the enlarged pituitary pressing against nearby eye nerves. They may not recognize a gradual loss of sexual function or libido. Only after treatment do some men realize they had a problem with sexual function.
(Again, the emphasis is mine.)
So I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about being totally in the dark about what was going on. Being a typical man, I’m clueless about a lot of things that don’t involve winterizing lawn equipment, cleaning gutters, or fixing inner tubes on my kids’ bicycles.
The other day I read that in rare cases a hormone problem like the one I had can lead to gynecomastia (enlarged breasts). Just a minute ago I found, and I knew this already, a link that says in rare cases … well:
In rare cases, there is so much extra skin that this must be reduced as well as the internal deposits.
To summarize, 14 in 100,000 have pituitary tumors that cause problems like oddball hormone levels. In rare cases these hormone problems lead to gyno. Gyno can often be treated with Liposuction — in rare cases some actual cutting needs to be done.
Would you care to guess where I fall with respect to all this rareness?
When I met with the plastic surgeon he told me my nipples would have to be removed and grafted back on. (And as a guy, I say nipple interchangeably with aureole.)
I’m thinking, that since they’re going to be off anyway, that maybe I could have them reshaped. Maybe get a skull and crossbones thing working.
Gyno can be caused by prescription medicines, drug use, smoking pot, alcohol use, steroids, bad hormone balance, and probably some other things I’ve forgotten. As boys enter puberty — as their hormones ramp up — x% of them will develop gyno which, in most cases, will eventually go away on its own. You’ve probably seen this even if you didn’t realize what it was.
When I was a big, fat guy I thought I had fat-guy-flabby chest and accepted it. When I started getting treatment for my hormones my endo quickly arrived at the conclusion that I had gyno. He also said it would become more noticeable as my weight dropped.
Having gyno bugs me. Maybe if I had perky ones it wouldn’t bother me so much. No. It would. See how I had to say ‘ones’ I couldn’t even say the ‘b’ word. If I weren’t so close to getting things taken care of I don’t know that I’d be able to type about it.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than having a doctor poke around on the gyno region confirming that you do, in fact, have gyno. I’d rather have my prostate checked daily (and perhaps I’ll develop a self-check so I can do it myself every morning) or have a colonoscopy. I know it’s a psychological thing.
Before we go, a quick nipple story.
Oh, about 20 years ago or more I was watching one of the Fletch movies with my buddy Roy (I think it was a Fletch). There was a scene in which Chevy Chase was sitting around with his shirt off.
I’m a big guy, I have size 14 feet, I’m over 6 feet four inches tall … I have appropriately sized nipples.
Anyway, Chevy is sitting with his shirt off. Just as I completed the thought, “he’s got my nipples,” Roy, who had for years seen me bounding up and down a basketball court shirtless, turned and said, “Hey Del, he’s got your nipples.”
