As a part of your protocol, your doctor has instructed you to take Gonal-F. This medication comes in prefilled syringes in a few different sizes. It comes in a 300 IU size, a 450 IU size, and a 900 IU. These medications are stored in the fridge.

The first time you go to use your pen, you'll take it out of the fridge and open the box. Inside the box you'll notice that there's multiple needle tips and the prefilled pen. You'll almost certainly have more needle tips than you need. That's okay. Just use what you need and then you can discard the rest when you're done. When you take the pen out of the box, you'll take the lid off and you'll see that the medication is at the top here.

This clear fluid. There's numbers on the side that help sort of measure the medication that's in there. You don't need to pay too too much attention to these numbers because you're going to measure it in a different way, which I'll show you next.

To prepare your pen, you'll take one of the needle tips. Take the paper tab off the top and the first time you're using it, you'll just twist it on to the top of the pen. And just twist it until it's nice and snug. When you take off this clear plastic lid, there's still a green sheath covering the needle tip there.

To prepare your dose, you'll look at the window here that has numbers in it, and you'll turn it up to the dose that your doctor has prescribed. Let's say your dose is 150 IU. You'll turn it to 150 IU in the window here. If you get excited and go past, that's okay. Just turn it back to 150 IU.

Then when you're ready to inject, you'll take off the plastic cap. Then you'll take off the green needle tip and your dose is ready to inject.

This is how you prepare your first dose with your Gonal-F Pen. It's important to remember that these are multi-dose pens. So once you've completed this dose, you'll take the needle off, you'll put the lid back on, and you'll put this in the fridge for your next time.

The next time you go to do the injection you will have already opened this. There will be less medication in the pen and this time to prepare the needle, you'll use an alcohol swab; you'll clean the top of the pen and then you'll get your needle tip. And same thing, you'll take the paper off. And you'll twist it onto the now clean top. And then just like we talked about before, you'll turn it up to the dose that's been prescribed.

When you're preparing to do your injection with Gonal-F you will choose a spot on your stomach to do this injection, and we'll go through landmarking and specific sub-Q instructions in the next part of the video, but particularly for Gonal-F when you're going to do this injection, make sure that when you inject the window that has the number in it is facing up so you can see it when you're injecting your stomach.

You'll put the needle in at 90 degrees and you'll make sure that your finger goes into the middle of this flower on the end of the pen. Push right down in the middle there while you watch the numbers in the window go all the way down to zero. Now that we're at zero, you'll pull the needle out of your skin and then let go with your finger at the top.

Now that your injection is finished, you can use the cap to put onto the needle and twist that needle tip off. Put the needle tip somewhere safe in your biohazard bag, and then put the lid back on. Remembering that there's still medication in here. You'll store it away in your box and put it back in the fridge until your next dose of Gonal-F.

In the next part of this video, we'll go over how to landmark and perform your 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.