Not to toot my own horn, but over the past few weeks I have become quite an expert at stabbing myself in the belly. After all I had to administer over 30 shots this cycle. My husband did the first couple of shots but after a few days he went out of town I started doing them myself. I stabbed myself on the front seat of my car several times. Prep, mix, pull, stab, push. So easy.
My husband and I like to sleep in on the weekends. Well, he sleeps in. I lay in bed reading blogs and checking my email on my iphone and occasionally try to snuggle. Last Sunday I pealed myself out of bed at 10:20 to prepare my trigger shot so that I could take it exactly 24 hours before my IUI.
I remembered the last time I saw my nurse she asked me if I needed instructions for the trigger shot and I declined them because I felt I had such expert injecting skills. The truth is I had never actually given myself the trigger shot because I always had an appointment the day before my IUI and brought my trigger with me so that the nurse could administer it.
I was standing in the kitchen opening the box to the Novarel when I noticed that the water vial was A LOT bigger than the powder vial. How much water should I mix? Shit. I raced off to my doctor's web site to check out the instruction videos. Okay, one milliliter, that's what I would have guessed. The video also showed the nurse switching between the mixing needle and the injection needle yet there was only one needle in the bag that came with the Novarel.
Looking back, at this point, I should have done more digging to see if I could use the same needle to mix as inject but I had always just handed that same bag to the nurse and I don't remember her using two different needle tops. Back to the kitchen I went. I mixed the medicine, prepared my stomach and pressed the needle to my desired spot.
Then I pressed the plunger and felt liquid dripping out.
Shit.
My mistake was I was so used to giving myself needles that I had stopped watching what I was doing. I have bigger boobs and I basically have to move them to see my stomach so once I picked out the piece of skin I wanted to stab I don't really look again. But as it turned out, I pressed the plunger down without piercing my skin and the medicine just fell out onto the floor.
Fast forward the hysterical phone calls and the drive to the one pharmacy I found ON A SUNDAY that had Novarel which they were willing to sell me out of pocket. I told my husband he had to administer the shot. He made me call the on-call nurse EVEN THOUGH I HAD SPOKEN TO HER FOUR TIMES EARLIER THAT DAY AND I FELT LIKE A FREAK. She told me how to mix the shot and administer it and said using the same needle was fine.
Except it wasn't. My husband goes to stab me with the needle and it's dull. We figure out the problem ourselves. Once the needle pierces the rubber top of the vial it is too dull to pierce my skin. We find a fresh needle, transfer the medicine and voila!
After some Dr. Googling, I found others complain about this issue - interestingly enough on a web site devoted to anti-aging medicine for men. Woahkay. But anyway, that is my cautionary tale. If you don't have a mixing needle for your Novarel, use a fresh needle for the injection.
The End.
No comments:
Post a Comment