Living with Testosterone Deficiency

My husband was recently diagnosed with low testosterone and has started taking the Testim gel.

He had been sleeping in every morning until 10:00 or later, and nothing I could do would shake him out of bed.

Every day he complained all day long. His tummy hurt. His back hurt. You name it, it hurt. Thing was, it didn’t hurt when he was at work, on the computer, watching TV, or doing some other activity he wanted to do. He only seemed to “hurt” somewhere when I would try to touch him. Not even sexual touch. Softly touching his arm would set him off. He was so GROUCHY when he would tell me, “don’t touch me, that hurts”!!!! I felt angry, rejected, and lied to… because as long as I wasn’t touching him, he seemed fine.

Then he stopped coming to bed at the same time as me, and he would stay up all night watching youtube videos online. So of course we weren’t having sex because he was rarely in bed at the same time I was. Sometimes I could coax him into bed, most times I couldn’t and he would say he wasn’t tired. Of course he wasn’t tired because he was staying up all night on the internet and then sleeping all morning the next day while I got up to go to work.

For a while I thought if I just kept trying to keep sex going, that he would get revved up eventually and take over the lead. It never happened. Sex was non-existent if I did not take charge and try to make something happen. I did not feel very feminine or womanly taking charge. I hated it. I thought men were supposed to desire their wives and make the moves on them. I felt so abnormal and so rejected because he never seemed to feel any desire for me on his own. He could usually get it up and have sex if I would rub him a certain way for about 30 minutes at a time. Thing was, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other if we had sex or not. If it didn’t work, he didn’t mind, he’d just roll over and go to sleep. I cried myself to sleep nightly for the first few months of marriage.

My breaking point came over the holidays, when it had been about a week since he had touched me. I confronted him about it, letting him know that we definitely had a problem. FINALLY he admitted that he thought he had a physical or medical problem. I hadn’t thought of that.

HALELUJIAH, at last, some kind of explanation that made sense! Tired all the time no matter how much sleep he got. Body parts hurting at random. Not wanting me to touch him. No sexual drive despite being newlyweds. Constant irritability. I was so relieved to know there WAS a medical problem when his doctor checked him out - because that meant there might be a medical solution.

I desperately hope that this medication will have an effect in helping him. Does any of this sound familiar to anyone else?