As a part of your protocol, your doctor has prescribed Menopur 225 units. Menopur is sold at the Markham Fertility Centre Dispensary at room temperature. It comes in a box that looks like this, or it may be sold in individual vials. When you go to do your Menopur injection, you'll need a few supplies. You'll need a Q-Cap, a syringe, a needle tip, and an alcohol swab along with your Menopur vials. To do Menopur 225 IU, you'll need three vials of powder and one vial of diluent.

When you purchase your medication, it's common that you end up with more diluent than you need. Again, it's three vials of powder, the white powder, to every one vial of diluent for this dose. If you have extra diluent, you can discard it.

When you're ready to do your injection, the first thing that you'll do is take the cap off of each of the vials. Use an alcohol swab to clean the top of the vials before you get started.

Then you'll open your Q-Cap, and you'll see the sharp part of the Q-Cap in the middle, and you'll pop that onto the top of the diluent vial first. So onto the liquid vial first. Then you'll open your syringe and twist your syringe onto the top of the diluent and pull back until there's about 1 mL of fluid inside your diluent vial. Once you've done that, you can twist off the top and set your syringe down on something clean. Pull off the Q-Cap from the diluent vial and pop it onto the top of the first powder vial. Then you'll twist the diluent syringe onto the top of the Q-Cap, and you'll push the diluent into that first vial of white powder, which is the medication, and just swirl it gently until it's all dissolved.

You'll see that the powder will turn into this clear liquid again pretty quickly. Then you'll turn that upside down and pull all that liquid back into the syringe, and just pull it all down until you have some air at the top to give yourself room so that if any drips happen, you don't lose medication.

Twist that off. Again, put this syringe on something clean. Pull the Q-Cap off and put it back onto the top of the second powder vial, and we'll take the syringe out again, twist it onto the top of the second powder vial, push in that fluid, swirl it around again until it's all dissolved.

So fairly quickly you should see that that white powder is turned back into a clear liquid. And once you see that it's dissolved, you'll turn it upside down and let it all come back into the syringe again. Again, leave some air at the top. So this is my fluid, this is my air, just to give yourself some room in case you have a drip.

Twist that off. Put the syringe somewhere clean. Take the Q-Cap off. Put it onto the third powder vial. Take your syringe, twist it on, and again, just push that plunger down so that all of the fluid again is into this third vial of powder. Swirl it around until it's dissolved. And then you'll pull back and again, just give yourself some grace. Have some air at the top so that if you do have a drip you haven't lost your medication. Twist that off. Set that somewhere clean. And now we're going to open the needle tip. Take the syringe, twist it onto the needle tip. Make sure it's nice and tight, and then take the cap off of the needle and just flick the syringe a little bit so that all the air is up at the top. And then you will slowly push the plunger up, up, up until you see one bleb of fluid come out the top of the needle tip and now your medication is ready for injection.

Again, we start with a mL of diluent, and we will lose some in the meantime, so you'll notice that the amount of fluid that you started with may not be exactly what you end with. That's normal. The important part is that all of the powder from all of those powder vials was diluted and added into your syringe.

The medication is in the powder, so that's the main thing. So the volume may have changed from the beginning, but you've got three vials of powder into that diluent now that it's ready.

At this point, your Menopur 225 IU is ready for injection. In the next part of this video, we'll go over how to landmark and perform a 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.