Injection day 2: the mental load.
Today was stressful in a completely different way than yesterday.
Yesterday was stressful because it was the first time I'd given myself the injections. Today was stressful because I thought I might have already messed them up.
At some point during the day, I started rewatching all of the medication videos. The more I watched them, the more convinced I became that I'd done something wrong with the Menopur the night before. I ended up on the phone with the pharmacist for almost 45 minutes, walking through everything step by step.
Turns out, I don't think I did anything wrong. But for a while there, I was spiraling.
You don't just become the patient. You become the pharmacist. The nurse. The doctor. The chemist. And somehow, also, the mathematician. The medication instructions, the packaging, the videos, and the supplies don't always seem to match each other perfectly. The video shows one type of needle. The kit has another. The instructions say one thing. The syringes make you question whether you're supposed to do something else. Then you find yourself staring at little glass vials of sodium chloride and powder, trying to figure out why there's 2 mL of liquid when the instructions only tell you to inject 1 mL — whether you're supposed to combine doses, whether you have enough syringes for all your medications, whether you've somehow misunderstood the whole process. I genuinely felt like I was doing fertility algebra in my kitchen.
Because every dose feels so important, every inconsistency makes you second-guess yourself. It's a strange thing — paying thousands and thousands of dollars for a medical procedure while being expected to mix medications and inject yourself at home. I'm sure it becomes second nature. But on day 2, it felt overwhelming.
The headache that stole the day
The physical part wasn't actually the hardest part today. The headache was.
I woke up with one of the worst headaches I've had in a long time. It sat right on the edge of becoming a migraine all day — bad enough that I had to lie down in bed for almost three hours with my eyes closed because light made it worse. If I still had my full-time job, I honestly would have taken the day off.
What caused it?
Hard to know. My period. The hormones. Stress. Lack of sleep. The early morning appointments. Probably all of it. It was gone by evening, but it completely stole the middle of my day.
Other than the headache, I actually felt okay physically. No nausea. No cramping. No major emotional swings. Just that headache.
Something I noticed but didn't expect
What surprised me
My period was surprisingly light. Normally I'd be changing tampons throughout the day, but since I'm using pads during this cycle, it was really obvious how little I was actually bleeding. I didn't even need to change my pad. Nobody mentioned this beforehand — another one of those moments of wondering, is this normal? That question seems to be the theme of this entire process.
By the time injections came around
I actually felt okay physically by the time I did my injections tonight. The Menopur didn't burn quite as much as the night before, though my stomach felt a little more sensitive afterward. My headache was still hanging around. But emotionally, I was exhausted.
Not because of the injections themselves. Because of everything surrounding them — the second-guessing, the troubleshooting, the responsibility. The constant feeling that you're one tiny mistake away from messing up something incredibly expensive and incredibly important.
I think that's what surprised me most about day 2. Not the injections. Not the medications. The mental load.
Everyone prepares you for the bloating. Everyone prepares you for the retrieval. Nobody tells you that you'll spend an evening standing in your kitchen trying to decipher medication instructions like you're studying for an exam you didn't know you were taking. Nobody tells you that you'll become the patient, the nurse, the pharmacist, the chemist, and the mathematician — all at the same time.
Nobody tells you how exhausting that part can be.