Betaseron; Step by Step

I started my MS therapy on Tuesday night. Danielle, my Beta Nurse came by the house to walk me through my first injection. Luckily, Danielle is a mother to a 6 year old and 3 year old because right as she got here, Ella was melting down wanting to go to bed, and Sofia had projectile vomited up the entire contents of her bottle all over Ricardo and her bedroom...good times.

Anyway, I'm glad she was here because the Betaseron process is not just a pull out of the package and inject deal, there are multiple steps involved and tonight when I did my first injection by myself, I found myself having to stop and think about what the next step was. Ricardo and I took pictures of the process to document. So here they are.

The Prep: My injection site rotation chart (today I injected into my left arm), the packet, the "betaject, and tylenol (to help minimize the flu like symptoms). After my first shot, I woke up at 2 am with the chills and there was nothing I could do to stop them. It was teeth chattering chills but after about an hour I was able to fall back asleep and I felt ok on Wednesday. I'm hoping that it's the same with tonights shot since Ricardo leaves at 5am for a bachelor party in AZ and won't be back until 11pm on Sunday.

The vile of Betaseron powder

First step is to attach the vial of powder to the syringe which is filled with the solution and push the solution into the vial and rock it back in forth for 4 minutes...4 minutes feels like forever.

Flip it all upside down and let the mixed solution fill the syringe. Turn it so the needle points upward and push out the fluid back into the vial until the syringe has only the amount needed to inject. I'm starting with .25 cc's, after two weeks I got to .5 cc's, then .75 cc's and on May 27th I start to inject the full 1 cc's.

Twist off the vial, create a little air bubble in the syringe then load up the betaject. There's a whole 3 step process to load up the betaject, but I won't bore you with the details.

Loaded and ready to inject

Inject, remove syringe from Betaject and toss.

That's it. It's not painful to inject-unless I hit a muscle. What sucks is the flu like symptoms that can happen. I was lucky with my first injection that I only had night chills. Let's hope it stays that way.

So, this is something I have to do every other night now. As I continue with the shots my body will get used to it and the flu like symptoms will decrease and I will also get faster with the process so I'm not too worried.