Appointments
- I kept a bag ready just for all those appointments with a calendar/notepad, usually some reading material, bottle of water, pen/pencil, germ-x, panty liners, cash for the parking fee, pair of socks (in case I was wearing sandals... I'm a socks in the stirrups girl) mints and random other things I considered appointment essentials. I dropped my wallet and phone in there each time and this became my purse on those days.
- During the time of frequent visits, I had to do the injections at the clinic since it's a long drive for us. I would just pack my meds/needles the night before and found it helpful to drop the Lupron down in an old pill bottle and put a cotton ball over it. I was always worried about a spill or something breaking.
- One of the most helpful things for us was setting everything up in one room on a table. (AKA- the wannabe nursery room.) The bathroom is right beside it so we could wash our hands and then all "supplies" were within reach. I even put my prenatal vitamins on the table so I wouldn't forget them.
- I didn't realize until the second or third night of injections that the little see through part in the lid of the vials was the "trick" to getting all of the liquid out. You can pull back while pulling the needle down and see what you're doing to suction it all out. Didn't leave any in the vial after figuring that out... probably something I should have learned at injection training!
- When they extended my meds by one day, those vials came with Q-caps. Oh, how those made life easy. If you have the option, they save time!
- Some people are lucky that the stims do not burn. I blamed the burning on Menopur but when I stopped using it, turns out the Bravelle was the culprit the whole time! Anyway, what helped me with the burning was pinching myself a little. I watched a few youtube clips of women doing the injections and one girl talked about how she focused on the pinch and that got her focus off the stinging and she was right! Somehow it made it easier to tolerate thinking I was causing the sting rather than the medicine. Mind over matter?
- I kept getting confused about when to change the estradiol patches so I started writing the date on them. Problem solved!
- This was probably a crazy OCD-type thing to do, but I always wanted to do the Lupron injection on one side and the stims on the opposite side and then rotate. It made me feel like I was balancing out the meds, not because someone told me to. So I would write an L on the small round bandages I used to stand for 'Lupron' and kept up with rotating the injections that way.
Part 2... PIO shots and side effects
