Medicine, Injections and a Transfer Date!

I have some exciting news! I have started my medications and am one step further in my surrogacy journey!

If any of you have gone through the IVF process before you know that it almost always requires medication. Lots of medication. Many pills and many injections.

Last week I started the pills part of the medication protocol. Pretty easy to remember to take a handful of pills every day so that part is not so bad. But yesterday evening I started my progesterone …. And progesterone needs to be injected. In my butt.

Progesterone is in oil so it’s thick and the needle for it is on the larger side. Oh, and did I mention that my husband has a great fear of needles (and is rarely home at my injection time) and that I’ll be doing most of these myself? Sounds like fun, right? 😉

Progesterone needs to be administered into your deep muscle tissue so the needle needs to go all the way in. The best place to administer it is in the upper, outer quadrant of the butt/hip. The process I followed was ice the spot, don’t think about what I am about to do, try to control my shaking hand, try not to think about what I’m about to do, jab it in without thinking about what I am doing to myself, slowly push the medication into my body (remember it’s in oil so this stuff moves slowly!), remove the needle, try not to think about what I just did, heat the spot with a heating pad, sit down, and finally try not to think about the fact that I have to do it all again tomorrow. 🙂

I will have to be on this medication for several weeks so I had better get used to it! The spot I put it in yesterday evening is pretty sore so tonight I may experiment with different icing/heating techniques and see what works and also try a slightly different spot on my butt to see if I can find a spot that’s higher up and less painful afterwards. It really didn’t hurt too bad going in, it’s just sore now!

Although the medication is not too fun, we do have something fun coming up in the future… we have a transfer date! Next week is transfer week! Drew will be flying with me to the state where the intended parents live and Drew’s parents will be watching the kids for us while we’re gone. I would love for you all to pray with me that this first transfer would be successful and that we would soon find out a little baby is on the way for this sweet couple. ❤

Here’s my medication and the needles I need to draw up and administer it. Progesterone is an intramuscular medication which means the needle needs to be inserted ALL the way in so that the medicine can get down into the deep muscle tissue.

Don’t worry. This big honker is just the needle used to draw up the medication out of the vile. The needle to administer it is (slightly) smaller.

The needle used to administer the progesterone.