I have joined a couple of Facebook pages and have been reading everyone’s posts. It is a bit scary how people are finding their workarounds for using the medication. I have been particularly fascinated by the discovery of the free 5th dose.
The pen is intended to contain four doses. There is additional medication to allow for the pen to be primed before each injection. Priming simply means ejecting a tiny amount of the medication to ensure that there’s no water bubbles present. But it would appear that the manufacturer, in ensuring that there is definitely enough for 4 whole doses, even if people waste quite a bit during the priming, that they’ve put in so much additional liquid, that there is actually more than one dose left over
The manufacturer simply says you use the four doses and discard any liquid remaining in the pen. And of course, this is what we would do without question if this was being prescribed on the NHS.
But these pens are costing around £200, so that fifth dose is valuable.
So, it’s hardly surprising that people have been figuring out a way to access it.
My husband is pretty horrified to hear of the methods that you can go to, which appear to be two options. One you attach another needle to the end and twist the pen beyond the point that it doesn’t want to be, effectively breaking the pen and accessing the last dose. The main downside is you can’t know for sure how much is left in the pen so you’re not going to be entirely sure to the point millilitre how much you had.
The other way of accessing it is to purchase a syringe and insert the needle into the injection point and draw out the fluid. There are videos on You Tube of exactly how to do this. This way you can see exactly how much you’ve drawn out and either eject any excess until you get the 0.6 ml dose or indeed, you might choose to have a slightly bigger dose for some reason.
For example, I’m still on my first pen which is just 2.5 mg doses. At the end of four weeks, I would be expecting to go up to 5 mg, so when I extract the fifth dose, because you can bet your life I’m going to, if it turns out there’s 0.8 mls, which seems to be fairly typical, I will have this slightly larger dose because this will give a small
stepping stone between the 2.5 mg and the 5 mg.
As I explained to my hubby, this is exactly the same as I do with other products.
I’m a fan of Trinny London, especially the BFF cream, and this comes in a small tube with a pump, and it costs about £40. If I had unlimited funds, I am sure that when that last pump ended, I would just throw it away, but I don’t, I take the scissors to it and squeeze out the excess into a little pot which, conveniently Trinny actually gives you whenever you place an order, and there’s another good week’s worth of product in there.
As far as I’m concerned, this is exactly the same.
It’s hardly surprising that when people are buying this, they are not going to be willing to throw this bit away, so although I am absolutely not qualified in anyway to be suggesting this, having spent some time googling and searching and matching and finding out about needles, this is what I have concluded.
The needles that come with the pen are 32-gauge and 4 mm in length.
I could not find an exact match. The nearest size syringe I found was 31-gauge and length 6mm. The ones that were 32-gauge were longer in length. I think it is more important to go for the shorter needle, than match the exact gauge.
I’m reasonably confident that the extra millimetres will not constitute a significant difference.
The main thing that is important is that it is not being injected into a vein or into muscle and that it is just going into fat, which is why we inject it into our belly or thigh. There should be a sufficient layer of fat for a 2 mm longer needle to still be comfortably in the fat zone.
It will be a couple of weeks before I have to try this method because I’m still only halfway through my first pen, so I will let you know how I get on.
In other news, for the last couple of days, I haven’t done a poo. I have resorted today to buying a gentle laxative because I don’t want it to have time to become a more serious issue.
I have taken a ‘gentle’ laxative, I took one Senokot tablet at about 8pm and I hope that it will do its thing overnight and that, tomorrow morning, all will be well.
For the last two days, I haven’t lost any weight.
On Monday, my weight remained the same and this morning it actually went up 0.4lb. I am putting this down to the constipation.
Other than not going to the toilet, I actually feel completely fine, so it may well just be that I’m not eating enough food to need to go.
Today all I’ve eaten is a protein smoothie and M&S Count On Us fish pie. It was about 350 cal. It’s probably the least amount of food I’ve eaten in a day.
This is largely because my husband is away, so I haven’t even thought about cooking a meal. I’ve just got myself a few low-calorie ready meals.
I’m still finding it weird that my day does not revolve around thinking what am I going to have for dinner. Looking forward to what I’m going to have for dinner making my dinner and eating my dinner.
I said that I was still finding that I was enjoying my food, but tonight if I’m honest, my count on us fish pie was functional rather than lovely, and that was okay.
It’s all very weird, but weird good.