Hi, I took my first estradiol cypionate injection this Sunday after staring at the bottle for about a month and I’ve been experiencing some muscle soreness since. I just want to make sure I haven’t fucked up something beyond repair, and it would be nice to talk to some humans about this rather than just following directions off the internet. I’ll include my process at the bottom but if someone can tell me “no that happens to everyone, you’re good” it would really help me. I understand there’s a lot more that goes into DIY HRT and I’m working towards that too.
Injection process I followed for scientific rigor:
Spoiler
I followed the directions as well as I understood it: using a luer lock syringe, I drew 0.1 mL from my vial using, I think it was a 22 gauge needle, after wiping it down with an alcohol pad, then realized I wasn’t going to get that amount out of the syringe due to drawing it incorrectly or some other mishap, so I drew more of the solution, about 1.5 mL. I swapped the needle out for a 25 gauge, 1.5 inch needle which was recommended for intramuscular injections, then I stared at the needle for about ten minutes trying to keep my hands from shaking due to a currently very inconvenient phobia of them, then injected the solution into basically the meatiest part of my glute. I’m underweight, so I assume my options for injections are fairly limited. No bleeding occurred, and the injection site looks like a small red pock currently
Regarding the amounts, we would need to know the dose per volume of your cypionate vial to understand whether 0.1 mL or 1.5 mL is appropriate.
For example, my estradiol valerate (EV) vials have 100 mg EV in 5 mL. So I use a 1 mL syringe (i.e. the most that the syringe can hold is 1 mL), and so if I wanted to inject 4 mg EV, I would draw and inject 0.2 mL.
1.5 mL sounds like a lot, and that’s a lot more volume than the maximum you can inject for a subq injection for example (no idea about max volumes for IM injections, though). I think the max for subq was something like 0.5 mL.
When I was injecting estradiol cypionate, my vial was 25 mg in 5 mL, and I usually injected 8 mg in a session, but because that required injecting 1.6 mL and I only did subq, I had to break it up into three subq injections (very wasteful of needles, and mentally challenging):
This was awful so I didn’t continue, even though cypionate was more stable and less spikey than valerate.
EDIT: just wanted to say, there are videos showing how to do injections - have you watched any? for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TP0rTlQVao
I apologize, my goal dose is 4mg, so for my 40 mg/mL vial I planned to inject 0.1 mL and drew about 0.16 mL. I lost a zero when I was recounting the process for the post. I watched multiple videos for general injections but did not see one specifically for HRT so your linked video will help in the future.
Something I’m realizing now is that I used a 3mL syringe, which explains why I wasn’t able to easily manipulate the smaller dose. I’ll make sure I have smaller syringes for my later injections.