SUPER SCARY SHOTS

I’m not afraid of needles. I donate blood as often as I can. It doesn’t really bother me. But that’s when a trained professional is doing it. Give me a needle and tell me to poke myself and I may panic. Especially when it’s something this important that I don’t want to take any chances of messing up!

Even though I’ve gone through the shot class at Mayo and watched the video at home, it still just scares the crap out of me. I’m constantly scared that I’ll put the needle on wrong, mix it up incorrectly, or inject the wrong amount.

This is a whole different thing. These fertility drugs are extremely expensive and the vials come in very specific amounts, so there’s no room for error. Otherwise you might not have enough medication for the next day. And unfortunately, these are specialty drugs that aren’t available in the town where I live. So you just can’t get them last minute.

These 2 new shots are quite scarier than the LUPRON. I can handle the LUPRON because you simply draw the air into the syringe, insert the needle, push the air in, draw the units back into the syringe, remove the need, and inject. Easy. Something I can handle.

But the GONAL F is a “pen”. The dosing adjusts with the turn of a dial, which, as it says, makes it easy to inject your precise medication dose for every injection prescribed. But it still doesn’t seem so easy to me. I’m still paranoid I’ll do it wrong. What if I set the dose wrong? What if when I load the new dose in, it doesn’t really all go in? I don’t trust it when you can’t see how much you put in like you can when it’s a vial. And besides the fact that you have to put a new needle on each time. Wait, I guess now that I’m writing it down, that putting the new needle on each time part doesn’t seem so scary. I need to stop being so scared of doing it wrong.

And for the MENOPUR medication, it involves two vials, one of which is sodium chloride and the other the MENOPUR tablet. It involves mixing these together with the use of more than one needle. This medication also comes with a Q-Cap. It is the only available vial adapter for needle-free reconstitution. It’s really quite interesting. The Q-Cap helps to eliminate stress, anxiety, and accidental needle sticks. This involves way too many steps for me still which therefore, still scares the crap out of me.

So, with all these shots, I am so very thankful to live just 2 short blocks away from my sister, Jesse, who happens to be a nurse at Mayo. And she gets everything together and injects the shots for me. Luckily for her, this stint of 3 shots per day only last for the next 10 days. So, I should be able to relieve her of her duties after these 10 days are up. We bundle up every night in this cold Minnesota winter weather a little before 9pm to head over to get shots from who I call, my Miracle Nurse…Jesse!

The shots go just fine. 150 units of GONAL F and 75 units of MENOPUR. All are given into my stomach. My only complaint is the MENOPUR shot, which is painful. It feels like someone is pinching your skin as hard as they possibly can. I can feel the medication going into my body and spreading out in different directions.

So, I guess I'd say I'm afraid of the medication...not the needles!