Thanks, @mayblin . I appreciate that thread and checking in on it is one of the main reasons that I come back on here several times a month!

My primary hope/wish/goal is to
A) safely make it to May/June 2027, when I will transition to traditional Medicare and can travel to and affiliate with an as-yet unidentified, cutting edge clinic (or practitioner within a clinic) who is enthusiastically following the evidence on anabolic use beyond 24 months. And

B) Hold onto my gains with as little exposure to antiresorptives as possible.

If the serum E2 I've achieved on 6 months of .05 patches comes back happily high (80-100?), I will probably cobble together a proposed plan to do self-pay bone markers and--if those ratios look good-- get organized to pitch him hard on using HRT as my only lock-in-the-gains follow-up till I start Medicare and can go somewhere cutting edge.

In the meantime, I had a HUGE blind-spot and realized I've been popping up to 6 (!) tums a day for the last few years as my gastric condition (EoE) has been rearing its head. I'm so annoyed that I treated them like innocuous pieces of gum. It's a little rare to have one's first stone at 64 and my urologist's office thinks the tums (and being VERY dehydrated the last year) did the trick and can be course-corrected. I am not so spooked about that kidney stone that I want to automatically throw in the towel on more anabolic medications--although I'm concerned and am eager to see what my 24 hour urine collection shows next week.

Thanks again to you and all! I know you can't give medical advice, but if you were getting self-pay bone markers in my situation (20 months of Tymlos complete and off for almost 6 weeks, on "nothing"), what intervals of bone marker testing would you do and what ratios would you look for?