As part of your protocol, your doctor has instructed you to use Puregon. Puregon comes in multi-dose cartridges. The first time you pick up Puregon, you'll pick up a box that looks like this, that has the pen inside, and you'll also pick up cartridges that have your medication inside. The cartridges come in different sizes, 300, 900, sometimes 600 units. The cartridges are stored in the fridge.

When you open your Puregon Pen, there will be a box inside that looks like this, and inside the box is the Pen room for a cartridge, and then some needle tips. There's also many more needle tips in each cartridge box that you get. You'll probably end up with more needle tips than you'll need, but that's okay just to use what you need and then you can discard the rest at the end.

To load your Puregon Pen, you'll take a lid off and twist this yellow part off of the blue part, and then you'll put the cartridge onto the plunger and put the yellow part back over top. And you'll notice it's kind of spring loaded, so you'll push it down. And then twist until you can see there's a blue arrow that will line up with the yellow line, and then you know it's screwed on.

You'll use an alcohol swab to clean the top of the pen, and then you'll take one of your needle tips, pull the paper off the top. And twist it onto the top of your Puregon cartridge until it's nice and snug. When you take off this white cap, there's still a green sheath covering the needle there. You'll be instructed by your nurses which dose of Puregon you should take, and you'll dial up in this window until you see your dose that has been prescribed, highlighted in the window. And you'll see this yellow line should line up to the dose that you've been prescribed. So in this case, my dose is 175. I've lined up the yellow line to the 175 and it's ready to inject.

With the Puregon Pen, if you accidentally go past the dose you were prescribed, then you can't just turn it back. You need to then dial it all the way up to the end. And then you can put it all the way back down. And then you start again to get up to your 175.  So again, if you go past the dose by accident, then just keep going all the way to the end of the pen, screw it back down, and then go up to your dose.

Now it's ready to be injected. So you'll take the cap off the top, take the green sheath off, and you'll prepare to do your injection.  When you're preparing to do your Puregon injection, make sure that you're inserting the needle so that the numbers face up so you can see these numbers. As you're injecting the medication. You'll push into the middle of the end of the Pen, and you'll watch that number go down, down, down, down, down to zero. Then you'll pull the needle out of your  skin. Then you'll release your finger.  Once you've finished your injection and the number is at zero, you'll take off the needle tip, put it in your biohazard bag, and then you don't need to take the cartridge out until the cartridge itself is empty, but just put the lid back on and store this safely in the fridge until your next dose.

In the next part of this video, we'll learn how to landmark and inject your subcutaneous injection for Puregon.

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.