As a part of your protocol, your doctor has instructed you to use Saizen 3.33 mg dose. To do this injection you're going to have a box of Saizen. You'll have a needle for mixing the medication. And then you'll have either this orange tip syringe or this set of a clear syringe with a needle separately; one or the other for injecting, and you'll have some alcohol swabs.

To get started. You'll open your box of Saizen. And inside this plastic case, you'll have the medication, which is the clear powder. In this blue top vial and the diluent, which is this clear fluid in the green top vial. You'll start by taking the lid off of these vials and opening the mixing syringe first.

Make sure when you open the syringe, you twist the needle tip onto the top to make sure it's nice and tight. Then you'll take the lid off. You'll pull back to about 1 mL of air in this syringe, and then you'll put the needle into the diluent vial first. Push in that air, turn it upside down, making sure that the needle tip is in the fluid, not up high, where there's just air. Make sure it's down in the fluid, and then pull back on the syringe until you have 1 mL of diluent in your syringe.

Then you can take that off and put the needle into the powder vial and just slowly push in the fluid into the powder and swirl that around until it's mixed. Once you see that, it's a clear fluid again, you'll take this mixing needle out of the vial and discard your needle in a sharp bin or biohazard bag, and you'll get your needle for injecting ready.

So in the case of the orange tip needle, what you're going to do is get 66 units of medication into this syringe. So you're going to go to the 60 and then two, four, six, past the 60 is where you get 66 units. When you're using the clear syringe, you're going to go to 0.66 mL.

So you'll see that halfway between the 0.6 and the 0.7 there's a longer line that's 0.5, so you're going to go just one line past that longer line to 0.66 mL. So it'll look something like this. You'll take the lid off the top. You'll have your air in the syringe first. You'll put the needle into the vial, insert the air into the vial, and you'll turn that upside down, making sure that the needle tip is in the liquid. And then you'll pull back on that plunger all the way down to 66 units. 2, 4, 6.

And then you'll pull that out. And now your 66 units or 3.33 mg of Saizen is ready for injecting.

When you're doing the 3.33 mg dose of Saizen, you're going to have a little bit of Saizen left in this vial. You're going to save this in the fridge.  It can be used for up to 14 days, so save this in the fridge.

And then the next time you do Saizen, you're going to mix the dose first with your new box of Saizen, and then you're going to withdraw this amount first. And then you're going to combine it to get to your 66 units with your next mixed dose.

And then in that vial you'll have a complete dose left over; so in three doses, you're going to use two boxes of Saizen.

From here, we're going to go to the next part of this video where we'll go over how to landmark and inject subcutaneously your dose of Saizen.

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.