As a part of your protocol, your doctor has prescribed you Menopur 75 IU injection.

You'll pick up your medication from the Markham Fertility Centre dispensary. It will come in a box that looks like this, or you may buy individual doses. When you open the box, you'll see that inside you'll have vials of powder and vials of liquid. To do a 75 unit dose, you'll need one powder and one liquid. The supplies that you'll need for this injection is a Q cap, a 3 mL syringe, a subcutaneous needle, and an alcohol swab.

To get started, you'll take the plastic cap off of your vials. You'll open your alcohol swab and clean the top of the vials.  Next, you'll open your Q cap and pop it onto the top of the vial that has liquid in it, the diluent. Then you'll open your 3 mL syringe and twist it onto the top of the Q cap. Turn that upside down. And draw back about 1 mL of fluid. If it's a little bit more than 1 mL, that's okay. Then you'll twist that off and set your syringe on something clean. Pull the Q cap off of the diluent vial and pop it onto the powder. Take the syringe with fluid in it, twist it onto the top of the Q cap and push that fluid into the medicine, into the powder.

You'll notice that that white powder dissolves into the fluid pretty quickly, and you're left with a mostly clear liquid, and you'll turn that upside down. And draw all that fluid back into the syringe.  So everything that you can get out of that vial, we want back into the syringe. It will be about 1 mL. If it's a little bit more, a little bit less, that's okay. The main thing is get all of the liquid out of that vial into your syringe, all that you can, and then just pull back so there's some air kind of at the top. Twist that off.

And now you're going to open your subcutaneous needle tip.  Twist the syringe onto the needle tip. You can take off the cap and if you have any air bubbles in the liquid here, you can kind of flick them to the top.  And then you'll slowly push the plunger all the way up to the top. Until you see a bleb of fluid come out the top of the needle, now your needle's primed and your Menopur 75 IU is ready to be injected.

Again, the volume will be about 1 mL. It might be a little bit more, a little bit less depending on how the mixing went, but the main thing is you've got all of the liquid at the top, a bleb of fluid out the top of the needle tip, and now Menopur 75 IU 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.