Time Out for this Message about Meds

I'll freely admit now that despite what one might think, doing IVF with surrogacy in India was much easier for me. Administering meds is a prime example. I simply went to the clinic every morning, laid on a cramped patient table, and let them stick a bunch of needles in my belly. Some days hurt worse than others, but overall not too bad and the security of having someone who does this every day for years was great

Here in the US, you do it all yourself. The ordering, the mixing, the injecting. The day of my first ultrasound I was supposed to have injection training, but then I found out they wanted to charge an extra $160.00 for the training. Our pharmacy has online videos for our specific meds, so when they told me of the extra charge, I declined. Chances are I wouldn't remember what they said  when I got home anyway and would have to pull up the videos and instruction sheets. I ended up watching a bunch of videos from a bunch of different websites and then picking the best one to show my husband so he could watch me and make sure I was doing it right.

Video from my pharmacy on injecting Menopur.

This gives you a bit of an idea, but I had a lot 

more vials

Basically the process is:

• sterilize counter and tops of vials 
• wash hands thouroughly and carefully
• get syringe and remove the big needle
• attach a q-cap
• add a little over 1mm of air to the syringe
• puncture sodium cloride and push in air. This helps draw out the needed +1mm of liquid back into the syringe
• puncture vial of Bravelle and add liquid from syringe. Make sure everything dissolves, but don't shake too much. Add back to syringe, making sure to get all the liquid
• repeat with adding the newly mixed liquid into the next vial of Bravelle. 
• repeat with all vials of Bravelle and Menopur. Should still only have about 1mm of liquid in the syringe when done, but all 8 vials will now be dissolved into that 1mm of sodium chloride.
• remove q-cap and attach smaller needle for subcutaneous injection
• alcohol wipe your belly, make sure no air is in syringe, pinch a fatty area of your belly, and insert needle at about a 90 degree angle. 
• slowly inject medicine. 
• make ouchy face

No one really warns you that some medications in the vials dissolve better than others (no rhyme or reason) or that liquid can get caught in weird places in the vial. They don't tell you about your heart skipping a beat when you almost drop a syringe full of $500 meds. They don't tell you that it will cross your mind on several occasions "shouldn't someone more qualified be doing this?" They may have gone over this in the $160 training, but somehow I doubt it.