That’s One Bigass Needle, Yo!

There was a time when I thought this was bad.  It was the first needle I had to learn to inject myself with and I remember having a minor cardiac arrest at the time because I was so nervous.  It turned out to be quite easy as it was sort of like a diabetic pen.  I just push the needle into my tummy and press a button and the pen does the work for me.

Little did I know what I was in for.  It gets worse, so much worse…

My medications were changed, so it required me to go learn to do proper (non-pen) type of injections.  That didn’t go too badly and other than having to do the mixing / injecting bits myself, nothing much had changed.  The needle was still the same size and still went into the same spot in my belly, so there wasn’t much difference.

Since I now know how to do real injections, I was told that I could cut out one hospital visit per month by doing my own trigger shot.  This excited and terrified me… You see, the needle above, and the ones similar to it, I do every evening.  It’s a smaller dose of hormones that is injected into my stomach over a longer period of time.

The trigger shot is completely different.  It’s a one-time large dose of hormones, injected into the muscle, that are meant to cause me to ovulate on cue.  I’ve never seen it done as I was always bent over a table while a nurse stuck the needle into my ass cheek.  I knew it hurt more than the ones I did myself but that was it… until tonight, the first time I was to do it myself.

This is the needle that I needed to use for my trigger shot… and no more of that easy in the tummy thing.  This one had to go deep into my thigh.  Owwie!

I sat there for a few minutes trying to work up the nerve to do it, which is how the photo came to be.  If I was just going to sit there I may as well get a photo out of it.

It was definitely more difficult than my other daily injections.  It felt like forever before the needle was all the way in and with it being in the muscle rather than just in my flesh, the medicine hurt a lot more as it was being injected.  Afterward, I got what felt like cramping in my upper thigh, not pleasant.

It did hurt, but I preferred doing it myself rather than having to go to the emergency room to have someone do it for me.  Not that I’d be looking forward to doing it again, mind you.  I hope now more than ever that I do finally get pregnant so I don’t have to do this again next month.  That would be nice.

I took photos of the needle halfway in, all the way in, and even the little blood droplet afterward… cuz that’s just how I roll.   I figured I’d cut you a break though as half the people who have looked at this have probably already fainted anyway.