As a part of your protocol, your doctor has instructed you to use Cetrotide. Cetrotide is a medication that comes in a white box like this and it's kept in the fridge. When it's time to do your injection, you'll take your Cetrotide out of the fridge and open the box. Everything that you need will be inside.

So you'll open the package by pulling back the paper. Inside the package, you'll have everything that you need for the injection. There'll be a syringe with diluent already preloaded into the syringe. This clear fluid is the diluent. There'll be a vial with white powder. That's the medication, and there'll be a needle that you're going to use for mixing, which is long and thick, and a needle that you're going to use for injecting, which is shorter and thinner.

To get started, you'll take the blue cap off of the top of the vial, and you'll twist the top of this plastic off of the syringe. From here, you'll take the needle that's longer and thicker and take the lid off the bottom of it. And then you'll twist this yellow piece onto the syringe, so it's nice and firm. Take the lid off of that needle and you'll push the needle into the vial, and then push the plunger down so all of that fluid mixes in with the medication. And then you'll swirl that around until the medication has dissolved. You won't see any more white powder in the liquid.

Then you'll turn it upside down, making sure that the needle tip is in the liquid and not stuck up in the air like this. You want that needle tip down in the liquid, and then you'll pull the plunger back down until all the fluid is out of the vial and into the syringe.

From here, you'll take that vial off the end of the needle, pull the plunger down just a little bit more, so there's a bit of air at the top, and then you can put the cap back on the needle just to help get it off. Twist that needle tip off, and then you'll open the next needle tip and twist that on top so it's nice and snug, and you can take the lid off. This is the needle that you'll use to inject.

So to get it ready to inject, you'll just slowly push the plunger up so you're clearing the air and push it up, up, up, nice and slowly until you see a bleb of fluid come out the top of the needle. Now your Cetrotide is ready to inject.

From here, you'll go to the next part of our video where we'll talk about how to landmark and perform a subcutaneous injection to deliver your Cetrotide.

How to Perform a Subcutaneous Injection

Now that you have your medication prepared, here's a video on how to perform a subcutaneous injection.

First, these injections are going to go into your abdomen. So you'll pick a spot two fingers away from your belly button and inject anywhere in your tummy.

The injection is going into that fatty layer of tissue right under the skin. So two fingers away anywhere in your tummy, just like this.
When you're doing your injections, you'll pick a spot, and then you'll rotate your sites. So try not to poke into exactly the same spot as you did already today or yesterday. Try to rotate the spots a little bit. Even a finger away is helpful.

When you're ready, you'll use an alcohol swab to clean the area that you're going to inject into, and then you'll give that a few seconds to dry. You'll take the cap off of your prepared needle and pinch your skin where you're going to do the injection. You'll inject at 90 degrees all the way in. Push the plunger on the syringe down until all of the medication has been delivered.

Then you can relax your skin and pull out the needle. A little bit of blood, a little bit of liquid might come out. That's okay. It's normal. You can use a tissue to hold the spot until the bleeding stops.

And then when you're done, make sure that you put your used needle into a sharps container or your medical waste bag.