"Aspire"....I thought it was called "getting a register", back in the day, or an "issue"...I better get out of here while I'm ahead.
The blood that goes into a syringe, quickly thickens and should be disposed of in the appropriate fashion....but so far, I have always gotten my shots at my clinic, I am a wimp about all this stuff, but want to learn how to inject my own Procrit.
@Ceanothus: you can just bring your (pegasys) prescription to any pharmacy and they will be happy to sell you a 12 pack of syringes, for 3 bucks, I just found this out~
I'm on my third tx, and have faithfully followed the instructions that accompany the Pegasys, to draw back and check for blood before injecting. In total of all my treatments I must have injected this stuff at least 120 times. My most recent injection shocked me - for the first time it really did start to fill the syringe with blood! It turns out that if you do get it into a blood vessel there is WAY less resistance to pulling back on the plunger, and I had a lot of blood before I even realized what was happening. It was painful to throw away the syringe and get out a new one, but I did. Now I'm wondering how much hassle it will be to get one extra syringe so I don't end up cutting tx short by one week.
I did it the first shot and after that forgot about it. For subcutaneous injections (just under the skin) you may go in thru a small capilliary ,however this will not affect absortion advesrely. "
I never even bothered to do it the first time.
She just said rehit...and I never thought of asking because it was a 3 hr training on all 3 medications....it was tooooo much info at once. Too much to take in. Scared the *hit out of my husband....hearing all the potential sides , dangers, to do's, needles etc.
I thought his head was going to explode.
I know the Pegasys instructions say to aspirate to see if there is blood and I did do that the first 2-3 times. I found it difficult to do. A person is already in an awkward position and the syringe is very small. Also, my syringes have a red barrel. Plus most of the barrel is covered with white that has information written on it. So it is really difficult to visualize and also awkward. I asked my case manager and she said there was no need to pull back and that she has never pulled back when injecting Pegasys into her patients. Since then, I have not pulled back. I have just injected it.
The important thing is to pinch up some of the skin and fat and hold it between your thumb and index finger. The needle is very short and this should keep you away from the possibility of hitting a vein (which is unlikely anyway). You may get a little bleeding after the shot but that is from hitting a capillary.
for me the most important thing about this is,
that IF(i know the chance is very very small)i hit a blood vessel,the interferon is still doing its job.