(Entry written prior to posted date).
Today Mom and I went shopping around Pikes Place Mall. We did mostly window shopping today, scouting out which places to come to later because the shops were getting close to closing soon. I had my eye on some new jeans in Old Navy. Almost all of my pants have holes in them these days. Maybe I could get one or two pairs after my payday. I’ve been delaying buying new clothes for a while because all my money has been getting funneled toward IVF expenses. My shoes are also falling apart. My shirts and underwear are getting little holes as well. I even have a sad looking bra that my puppy got a hold of and now it holes in it too. How in the hell can almost everything I own have at least one hole? I am way overdue for getting new clothes. But new clothes are just some of the many sacrifices you have to make in order to pay for IVF. Vacations have been put off, college graduation delayed, and even paying for gas to get out of the house are just some of the many sacrifices I’ve made. So going window shopping today was kind of a reminder of all the things I can’t have right now. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to soon.
Don’t do what I did today! Long story short, I messed up on my Omnitrope. If you don’t know, Omnitrope is one of the Human Growth Hormones that helps with egg growth. Since I tend to be a one-step-at-a-time kind of gal when it comes IVF I didn’t look too much into the details of the Omnitrope because I thought it was already clear. I assumed there would be a video for how to do the Omnitrope, like there has been with every single other medication I’ve been taking. Instead, the video was missing from the fertility clinic’s website. I was looking at the vial itself and tried to interpret the convoluted conversions and it just didn’t make sense to me.
The bottle had four different measurements to describe one damn amount. It said mL, mgs, cc’s, then IUs. I decided to email them about it. I pulled out the syringe, looked at it, and asked them “what line on this syringe do I pull back to give myself?” Simple question, right? My regular nurse was out so a backup nurse replied, “For the Omnitrope your dose is 0.5mL.” Okay problem solved I thought. So they day comes when it is time to give myself the medicine. I look over the instructions and realize that there is a different syringe I should be using, one that had IUs on it. Now I’m really confused. Mind you I had a suitcase full of these medications and the bag of these extra smaller syringes are identical to my Menopur syringes, so I thought those were just for the Menopur. I read the Omnitrope instructions carefully on this one page piece of paper that came with the medicine. Makes sense now. I pulled back 0.5mL of liquid (just like the nurse said to), pushed it into the vial, then pulled back my medicine to inject it.
Use the top needle to mix the liquid with the Omnitrope powder. Use the bottom smaller needle to administer the medication. The quarter is to show the size of the needles.
But something in the back of my head was saying, “Are you sure you did that right?” I started to really doubt myself. I went online and I began searching for video tutorials from anyone, just to make sure I did it right. Well, as it turns out I really messed up. The video I finally found showed her pulling back 1mL of liquid, not 0.5mL. I ended up accidentally double dosing myself. The 0.5mL pushed into the powder medicine only ended up yielding half the amount of liquid substance, yet double the amount of actual medicine. So the 0.5mL explanation the nurse gave me was not accurate. I was trying to ask her about the liquid amount for the first syringe, not what the tiny syringe would end of up being. I gave myself the whole vial when it should have been half. The fact that the vial had four different conversions for the prescription, combined with the email response from the backup nurse, and the fact that the clinic did not have a tutorial video for this medicine all turned out the be the perfect storm for my very expensive f**k up. How expensive? Well I had to shell out another $1200 the very next day, because that medicine was supposed to last me two days. I was pissed to say the least.
My advice to you if you do need to take Omnitrope for the first time is to have your doctor actually show you how to do it. Unfortunately my local doctor was unavailable when I received the medicine so I had to do email correspondence while I was out of state for my treatment. I should have actually gone in to have them show me, but I didn’t realize it was going to be incredibly confusing. If need be, bring in your syringes and have them actually mark or put a sticky not on where exactly you will pull back the liquid as well as how far back to pull back for the actual medicine. The other problem was that the nurse was describing a conversion that wasn’t even on my syringe. So get organized and plan ahead. Bring in your medicine and ask for a thorough explanation with demonstrations. If available, review any tutorial videos. I will say I am not very happy about what happened at all. But I at least know what to do differently next time.
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Featured Image: My Omnitrope medication with syringes and needles.