ADT, Muffins, and Life

I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on TV. I don’t even own a lab coat, unless you count that bathrobe I wore during the pandemic and called “medical attire” to get out of Zoom calls. What I am is an observer of casual life — that unglamorous, unsupervised theatre of the absurd where people forget their passwords, misplace their children, and develop mysterious ailments between coffee and lunch.

I don’t offer medical advice. I offer observations, suspicions, and the occasional sarcastic aside — drawn from the sidelines, where the lighting is worse but the truth tends to be clearer.

Hormonal Muffinhood isn’t glamorous. It isn’t noble. It’s not even tragic. It’s just there, squatting in your midsection like a bloated metaphor for everything that's gone wrong.

Why I Call It a Muffin

Because muffin sounds cuter than hormonal abdominal collapse. Because calling it a “gut” or “belly” doesn’t capture the full, doughy indignity of it, the way it balloons defiantly over my waistband like it’s trying to escape captivity and roll into a bakery support group. This isn’t a six-pack gone soft; this is a muffin top gone rogue, a swollen, ADT-fed pastry of despair that now introduces me to rooms before I get there. It’s warm, it’s soft, it’s involuntary, and like most muffins, it wasn’t really asked for, just delivered.

You don’t build a muffin on ADT. It rises.

When I began Androgen Deprivation Therapy - “ADT” for those fluent in medical euphemism, or “chemical castration” for those who still cling to metaphor like a lifeboat - I braced myself for the obvious: hot flashes, mood swings, the slow erotic fizzle into neutered domesticity. I expected my libido to pack its bags and leave a note. What I didn’t expect was to wake up one day and discover I’d swallowed a couch cushion.

This isn’t a belly. This is a statement. A flesh-based protest against biological meddling. A hormonal coup d'état beneath my sternum. It’s less “dad bod” and more “bioengineered flotation device.” It doesn’t jiggle. It presides. It doesn't just enter a room. It precedes me, scouting the terrain for unstable chairs and judgmental stares.

And it’s not alone. The belly is merely the general in a vast campaign of bodily insurrection. The troops? Sagging glutes, confused nipples, insomnia, and a nervous system now held together by nap scheduling and blind hope. My body, once a cooperative if slightly cynical ally, now behaves like a passive-aggressive roommate with access to your medications.

Let’s talk logistics.

Bending Over: A Strategic Risk Assessment - Remember tying your shoes? You’d bend, knot, rise, like a normal person. That’s over. Now it’s a diplomatic mission involving leverage, furniture, and audible negotiation with your lower spine. I don’t “put on shoes” anymore. I lower myself into a footwear scenario and hope the shoes don’t blink first. Velcro is no longer a convenience; it’s survival gear.

Walking: A New Adventure in Physics - I don’t walk. I displace. The belly moves first, followed by the rest of me in slow, reluctant agreement. I have a new center of gravity somewhere in my thorax. Stairs are now adversaries. Escalators? Trust falls for adults. And if you think “core strength” is still a thing, you’ve never tried getting up from a couch post-Firmagon without making a noise last heard in dying whales.

Sex: The Hilarious Afterthought - Yes, let’s address the blindfolded elephant in the room: sex. It’s not that it’s gone. It’s that it now feels like performance art created by someone who’s only read about it in ancient Greek tragedy. There are gadgets. Devices. Timing rituals. Entire subreddits are dedicated to resuscitating the fallen. Erections have become rare events, like solar eclipses, still theoretically possible, but best viewed with protective eyewear and low expectations.

Mood: Please Fasten Your Seatbelt - My mood now has all the stability of a stock market graph drawn by a drunk. One minute, I’m crying at a dog food commercial. Next, I’m screaming at a Tupperware lid. Rage comes in waves. Sadness hovers like background radiation. Occasionally, I feel something resembling joy, but it’s usually a misfire. ADT doesn't flatten emotions. It reroutes them to strange places. I wept openly once during a plumbing commercial. There were no survivors.

Social Life: A Study in Retreat - Invitations arrive and are swiftly ignored. “Come out with us,” they say. “Have a drink.” Yes, let me throw back a glass of water, try not to sweat through my shirt, and explain why I look like I’m smuggling a meatloaf under my ribs. It’s not a party. It’s a hostage negotiation between my endocrine system and me.

Sleep: A Loose Concept - Sleep comes in bursts, like failed software updates. I wake up soaked, as if I’d been interrogated by my own metabolism. The sheets are damp. The dreams are weird. Sometimes I dream I’m pregnant with regret. Other times, I dream I’m fighting a war against a thermostat that keeps moving. Either way, I wake up confused and padded.

Toilets: An Increasing Presence - I know every bathroom in a 10-mile radius. I have favourites. Ones with good lighting. Ones with a strong flush. I can judge a café based on urinal placement. My bladder and I are now pen pals. It sends messages frequently. Usually around 3 a.m.

The Mirror: A Lying Narcissist -Mirrors no longer reflect. They accuse. I see myself, swollen, soft, and faintly confused, and wonder who greenlit this reboot of my body. My nipples point in different directions. My waist is a concept. And my face seems to ask, “Did we need to survive this long?”

Hope: An Elastic Waistband -I’ve surrendered to sweatpants. Not stylish joggers. Actual sweatpants. The kind you once mocked on airport travelers and “retired uncles.” I am now that uncle. I wear them proudly, defiantly, like a man who knows he’s lost the war and is now specializing in guerrilla dignity. And yet… here I am. Bloated. Bent. Balding in strange places. But alive.

Hormonal Muffinhood isn’t glamorous. It isn’t dignified. It’s a Kafkaesque sideshow of swelling, sweating, and slow-motion surrender. But it is mine. And if you need me, I’ll be reclining somewhere between denial and acceptance, ideally in stretch fabric, near a fan, and within sprinting distance of a bathroom.

PART TWO: MY WIFE’S PERSEPECTIVE ON MY MUFFINHOOD

My Husband, the Softening Storm: A Survivor’s Guide to Androgen Deprivation Therapy. Or: How to Love a Man Who Is Melting from the Inside Out

I didn’t marry a eunuch. Let’s just start there. When I said “in sickness and in health,” I wasn’t imagining a man who’d one day stare blankly into the fridge for twelve minutes because the yogurt wasn’t where it “emotionally belonged.” But here we are. Welcome to marriage, post-ADT. Population: me, my partner, and a sentient belly with its own gravitational field.

Androgen Deprivation Therapy, or ADT, sounds clinical. Almost noble. Like something that happens in a laboratory while men in lab coats nod thoughtfully. What it actually is, for the spouse, is a front-row seat to hormonal Jenga, where every emotional block is booby-trapped.

Mood Swings: Now Featuring Weather Alerts- I wake up not knowing which version of him I’ll get. Will it be Weepy Nostalgia Guy who misses commercials from the '90s? Or Furious Dish Inspector, who believes the dishwasher has turned against him? There is no warning. No pattern. The man, once unfazed by childbirth, now tears up over a missing sock. One morning, he sobbed quietly into his cereal because he remembered a dog he saw in 2012. I offered comfort. He accused me of "minimizing the emotional journey of Buster." Buster was not our dog.

The Belly: Our New Roommate - It enters rooms before he does. The belly now gets its own chair at dinner. I’ve named it “Sir Pudgealot.” It has opinions. It gets stuck in the doors. Watching him try to tie his shoes has become my new cardio. There is groaning. There is leaning. There are words whispered to God that I’m certain no religion condones.

Sleep: A Team Sport, Apparently - We used to sleep. Now we attempt to sleep. He wakes up drenched in the sweat of his regrets, flinging the covers off like they’ve betrayed him. The fan is on. Then off. Then on. Then aimed “strategically” at only his lower torso, as if his thighs are running a fever and the rest of him is fine. Some nights, he sleep-mumbles about his prostate. I answer on behalf of it. We are now three in this marriage.

Sex: A Choose-Your-Own-Anticlimax - Let’s not sugarcoat this. The libido left like it was late for a train and never looked back. We tried toys. We tried pumps. We tried earnest communication. At one point, I think we tried ritual chanting. Nothing says “romantic weekend” like the sound of suction devices and quiet weeping. He’s more focused now on satisfying me, which is sweet. Noble, even. Except it’s like being seduced by an exhausted camp counselor. Earnest, well-meaning, but slightly damp and unsure where anything is anymore. Still, bless him for trying. I fake sleep some nights just so he doesn’t feel like he has to “try a different angle.”

Dietary Changes: Gaslighting by Kale - He reads about “anti-cancer diets” now. We’ve thrown out joy. Coffee has become “too acidic.” Cheese is “a hormone bomb.” We now eat things that taste like wet paper and sadness. I miss flavor. I miss food groups. I miss butter. He made us a chickpea loaf last week. It tasted like betrayal.

Conversations: Monologues with a Mood Meter- He talks. A lot. About hormones. About survival. About his new belly-to-shirt ratio. I nod, gently redirecting him when he starts explaining his PSA levels to strangers at the grocery store. He is becoming that person. The one who corners people with organ updates.

Public Outings: A Ballet of Layering - Going out involves a clothing crisis so profound it should be managed by FEMA. Nothing fits. Everything’s “too something.” Too tight, too scratchy, too cruel. The shirt is “judging” him. The pants are “mocking” him. We once missed an entire movie because he couldn’t decide if his hoodie was lying to him.

And Yet…

Here’s the thing: he’s still here. Still fighting. Still trying. Still dragging his swollen self out of bed to make coffee for me some mornings. Still asking if I’m okay, even when he clearly isn’t. Still finding time — between hot flashes and existential spirals — to make me laugh at things that should, by all rights, make us both weep.

So I stay. I love. I adjust.

I Google “sexy elastic waistband options” and pour the wine he’s not supposed to drink. I listen to his rage against the waistband, his cries of betrayal by former trousers, and his deep belief that linen is out to humiliate him. Because this, too, is love. Not the glossy, rom-com love. The other kind. The real kind. The kind that holds your hand while your hormones hold you hostage. The kind that says, “Yes, I see your muffin top. No, it doesn’t make me love you less.

But yes, you do need to put on real pants if we’re going to my mother’s.”