Marc Turner was on the up. It was the summer of 2019, and after a stint working in banking, he’d got a full-time job tending to the parks in the city of Mississauga, just southwest of Toronto, exchanging the grey thrum of the office for day after day in nature—planting flowers, mowing grass. The 34-year-old had just bought himself a place in the lakeside neighborhood of Port Credit, and had splashed out, filling his new place with a remote-controlled bed, two 65-inch TVs and some houseplants. In his free time, he’d take long bike rides with his best friend Chris, stopping to point out the local greenery he’d tended to, like the blue spruce tree, sprouting in Lakefront Promenade. His mom, Denise, said she’d never known Marc happier. And yet something was bothering him. His hair was falling out.
For a couple of years, Marc had been using Rogaine, a brand name for minoxidil, massaging one of the few clinically proven hair-loss medications into his scalp. He was meticulous about his appearance, clean-shaven and neatly dressed. And he took particular care of his hair, which was dark and thick and always carefully styled. But by the summer of 2020, he was shedding, in his estimation, over 200 strands a day. Marc panicked. He went to his doctor and was prescribed finasteride. His doctor warned him of the drug’s potential side effects, as Marc recounted in a blog post, but he was told that they should abate if treatment was stopped.
Marc had also heard about something called Post-Finasteride Syndrome, or PFS—a constellation of sexual, physical and mental side effects that, according to the small number of finasteride users who describe experiencing them, stick around long after taking the drug. He figured that the risk was low. So, in September, he decided to take the medication anyway. At first, he felt waves of relief, as if he’d outrun fate, cheated his own genetic lottery. But a few weeks in, something was off. Marc’s mind felt foggy.
A year earlier, in 2019, Canada began requiring finasteride manufacturers to include a warning about the risk of suicidal ideation on the product’s packaging. Depression was also among the potential side effects listed on the labels. But there was no mention of brain fog—there wouldn’t be, as it’s not an official medical term. Marc stopped the medication, then tried it again on a lower dose. “That’s when the horror story began,” Denise told me.
A week later, while watching a film with a friend, he had a panic attack. Holding onto his hairline no longer felt worth it, and he quit finasteride the next day. Marc’s brain fog didn’t stop. Nor did the panic attacks. His genitals shrank. They lost sensation. His joints cracked loudly when he moved. Ringing blared persistently in his ears. He was jittery, constantly on edge, unable to sleep. To Denise’s knowledge, Marc wasn’t taking any medications other than finasteride. “I don’t know what’s going on with my body,” Denise says he told her. “It’s like I’m in a torture chamber and don’t know what the next thing is going to be.”
Source link