Your doctor has prescribed you Menopur 150 IUinjections as a part of your protocol; we're going to talk about how to mix and prepare this injection.

First, you'll pick up your Menopur from the Markham Fertility Centre Dispensary. It comes in a box that looks like this, or you may buy individual doses. Inside the box, you'll see that there are powder vials and liquid vials.

For Menopur 150 IU, you need two vials of powder and one vial of liquid. When you're buying medication for Menopur 150 IU, you'll always end up with more diluent than you need at home. It's two vials of powder to every one vial of liquid. The extra liquid you can discard of.  You'll also need a Q-Cap, a syringe, a subcutaneous needle tip, and an alcohol swab.

You'll start by taking the caps off of the vials, and you'll take your alcohol swab and clean the top of each vial.  And you'll open your Q-Cap. The Q-Cap is going to pop on to the liquid vial first, the diluent, and then you'll open your syringe and twist it on to the Q-Cap. You'll turn that upside down  and draw back to about 1 mL of fluid. If it's a little bit more, that's okay. We're shooting for about 1 mL of fluid,  and then you'll twist that off and put your syringe back on something clean. Take the Q-Cap off of the liquid vial and pop it onto your first powder vial.  this vial has the white powder in it, and then you'll twist the syringe onto the top of the Q-Cap and push the fluid into the vial. You'll notice that the white powder will mix pretty quickly into that fluid, and you'll be left again with a clear fluid. Turn that upside down. And draw back all the fluid out of that vial that you can get into your syringe. Leave some air at the top and then you can twist that off.

Set your syringe back on something clean and pull the Q-Cap off of that vial and pop it onto your second vial of powder. Again, you'll notice there's a white powder in this. You'll twist the syringe onto the top of the Q-Cap and push that fluid in there again, mix it around and you'll be left again with a clear fluid,  and you'll turn that upside down and draw all that fluid back into your syringe inch.

Leave some air at the top here, twist that off.  And then you'll open your subcutaneous needle tip.  Twist that on, take the cap off the needle, and then if you have any air bubbles in your fluid, you can kind of flick them around until they're all up at the top where the air is here.  And then slowly push that plunger up, up, up until you see a bleb of fluid out the top of the needle. You'll notice that the volume will be about 1 mL. It may be a little bit more, a little bit less, depending on sort of how things went when you were mixing. But the point is you've gotten all of the fluid out of those two powder vials and into your syringe.

Now your Menopur 150 IU dose is ready for 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.