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

  • Lily [she/her, pup/pup's]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago
    spoiler

    muscle soreness is pretty normal with IM injections (seeing as ur injecting into well… muscle).

    i recommend using a smaller needle (25g or higher) to draw as it minimizes coring risk, you could just use the needle youre using to inject to do it. swapping needles isnt really necessary, see insulin syringes (but theres also not really a reason to not do it).

    it is verrrrrry recommended to inject into your thigh, injecting into your glute carries a high risk of accidentally hitting your sciatic nerve (bad time) and its also just less visibility. no being underweight doesnt mean you cant inject to your thigh.

    other than that, you could always switch to subq rather than IM, as levels between the two are functionally identical on cypionate, which may help with the soreness.