As a part of your protocol, your doctor has instructed you to do a Decapeptyl injection. This medication is stored in the fridge and will be sold to you in these individual syringes. Typically, you'll use two at a time.

To prepare the injection, you'll open the plastic casing from each of your syringes, take the syringes out. You'll notice that there's a little bit of air at the top.

The medication is already loaded into the syringe and mixed for you, so you just take the lid off the top and then very slowly push until you notice the air out of the syringe. And a small bleb of fluid come out the top of the needle. You'll do this for both,  so I'm just pushing slowly, pushing to the top till the air is out of here. You'll see that a couple of blebs of fluid have come out the top of the needle. That's totally okay.

Now that I've gotten the air out of both of the syringes, they're ready for injection.  Decapeptyl is almost always two injections at a time. You'll be instructed on a specific time to take this medication by your nurse.

In the next part of this video, we'll go over how to landmark and inject this subcutaneous injection.

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.