Needles

I am glad that I have been keeping track of all of this. I was talking to someone the other day about it all and they asked if I had been keeping a journal about it all. I told them yes, and they said, "Good, you will probably forget a lot of what you went through, so keeping a journal now will help you to look back and see it all." I thought that was a very good point, there are certain points in my life where I really wished I had written in my journal about it, but either I was not able to, or I just didn't. Now that I am going through all of this to get pregnant I really do want to keep track of what happens. For those interested here is my current musing about the needles and the shots I am giving myself.


Today I started my next two shots. Follistim and Menopur. Follistim is injected with an injection pen. It is a neat little device. To use the pen you load a cartridge of Follistim into the pen and then screw on a micro needle (29 gauge) then to give yourself a shot you dial up (screw the end of the pen until it shows the number you need) your medication amount, then you take the caps off the needle and inject the needle and then press down on the end of the pen to inject the medication. Only thing I don’t like about it is that when you inject the Follistim the pen end twists as you press down, this makes injecting it difficult.

Menopur is mixed before injection, so you take 1 ml of saline and put it into the vial that holds the powdered Menopur medication, then you swirl the vial to mix. After mixing you draw out all of the mixture and screw the injection needle onto the syringe. The injection needle for the Menopur is 25 ½ gauge.

So total I am taking three shots, 5 units of Lupron with a 28 or 29 gauge needle, 150 units of Follistim with a 29 gauge needle, and 75 units of Menopur with a 25 ½ gauge needle. Now if you are unfamiliar with gauges, the higher the number the smaller the piece of metal, so a 1 gauge is actually rather huge and thick, while a 30 gauge is rather tiny and thin, so a 29 gauge is a very thin needle, and a 25 ½ gauge needle though still quite thin is a bit larger than the 29 gauge needle. However today as I put each needle in I found that the 25 ½ gauge needle didn’t hurt going in, but the medication hurt when I injected it, the 28 gauge needle hurt at first when I started to insert it the medication was fine as it was the 5 units, and the 29 gauge needle actually hurt the most when I inserted it, but the medication didn’t hurt at all because I had difficulty pressing down the end of the Follistim pen so the medication went in slowly.

Overall the process took me 15 minutes total, and that was with me having prepared the Follistim pen and a syringe of 5 units of Lupron last night, I think I will continue to do that as I don’t have a whole lot of time in the morning (I like my sleep), I have to prepare the Menopur right before I inject it so I can’t make up a needle of it the night before. The Follistim cartridges that I have been given are 300 units each, with a 150 unit prescription that means that one cartridge will give me 2 injections. The whole thing comes in a handy dandy carry case that holds the needles the pen and an instruction manual, the instruction manual has a record keeping part of it so that you can keep track of how much Follistim you have taken and how much is left in your cartridge. It is kind of like keeping a checkbook.

I am thinking of going and visiting my family this weekend. I need to talk to Kevin about whether we want to attend church with my family. If we do I will need to figure out what stuff I will need to take with me, shot wise.

Next Monday is my next doctor’s appointment; they will be monitoring me, taking an ultrasound and blood work. Before this is done I fear that my right arm will begin to look like a heroin addicts, so many needle marks to show all the blood taken.