Today I am going to teach you how to administer a Vitamin B12 shot either for yourself or
as a care giver who might be administering it to patient.
First of all I'm going to go through the supplies that you need.
You need an alcohol swab or if you're at home and you don't have any alcohol swabs you can
use your bottle of alcohol with a cotton ball.
You will need the syringe and you will of course need your Vitamin B12 that the physician
called in for you.
The physician will probably have called in your syringe with your needles also.
With my patient population I do prefer the smaller needle which is a 25 gauge, one inch
needle.
And actually that is the size of the needle that they use to give you your seasonal flu
shot.
So for all of you that have needle phobia it is OK to use a smaller needle.
At home I'm going to use my little skin pad but you can also practice on an orange or
any kind of fruit.
A lemon would work or even an apple.
I like to use the orange and the lemons only because they are softer and it has more of
a skin like feeling.
So what you'll do is go ahead and just open your alcohol swab and get it ready or get
your cotton ball ready.
I'm going to go ahead and take out the syringe and all of the syringes that you use will
always have numbers on it and the most common doses of Vitamin B12 are what we call 1cc
or 1ml.
Now according to your physician he may choose to give you a different dose.
On the 3cc syringe it is numbered from a half cc to 3ml or 3cc.
You will always focus on the 1.
And then you will have of course your vial of Vitamin B12 and on your bottle it will
probably not say Vitamin B12 it will say a long difficult name and it's called Cyanocobalamin.
So what we'll do is go ahead and prep the skin.
So you can practice this with your orange.
And you go ahead and take your alcohol and you will clean just the surface of the skin
just rub it a little bit.
You might want to kind of fan it and let it dry a little bit because sometimes when you
inject the needle into the skin it might cause a little bit of a stinging or burning from
the alcohol not from the medication.
You go ahead and just pull the cap straight off of your needle and go ahead and pull what
we call the plunger that's this little thing sticking out here.
And hold onto the barrel of the syringe and you will simply pull the plunger down to the
number one.
There is a little black rubber stopper in this syringe and it is sometimes kind of hard
for you to see but you will actually pull that rest of the black stopper all of the
way down until you reach the top of the line.
In this one there is actually two layers of lines and you can measure it by stopping at
the top layer of the plunger not by the point of the plunger.
So basically you are going to draw in 1cc of air into this syringe.
And then you will take your bottle.
And when it's brand new you will have a plastic cap on it which is a protective cap and you
will just simply pull it off you will also take your alcohol and clean that off.
Even though the first use it is clean underneath that plastic cap it's OK just to get in the
habit of cleaning the top of the stopper because each time you give the injection you will
need to clean it just too basically clean off any um.
It's really not a sterilization, alcohol is not a sterilization product but it will just
clean off the surface of any kind of dirt or anything that might have gotten on top
off it.
And then you will simply leave it on a surface clean surface and a flat table or whatever
you feel comfortable with and you will go ahead and just inject the needle in through
the rubber stopper at the top of the bottle and each time you practice this and the more
shots you give you will actually develop your own technique and so you don't have to be
exact on what I'm showing you.
And it’s just whatever you feel comfortable doing on how you need to hold your syringe
and how you need to hold your bottle and actually when you inject it into the somebody.
So, I'm going to hold the bottle and I'm just going to take my dominant hand, and of course
I'm left handed.
And, I'm going to push the plunger down.
So basically I'm pushing the air into the bottle.
So now you're ready to withdraw the medication and you're going to simply just turn up the
bottle upside down, hold up your syringe and as I said before everybody is going to develop
their own technique I actually just grasp the syringe with my pinky and fourth digit
and then I have it held like this and I'm stabilizing it up here.
And I'm going to pull this plunger back and I'm going to draw past the 1.
And the reason for that is just so you can actually, you're going to have an air bubble
probably here at the top of the syringe and then you can draw more than you need and then
push it back up and by pushing that back up to the one you actually push the air bubble
out.
And in this one it is out and sometimes it's real common that you will have still some
air bubble in it.
If that happens you can actually take your finger and tap it or for me it’s easier
I can just stabilize the bottle and stabilize the syringe and you can tap it on the side
of the table and that brings those bubbles to the top of the surface and gets rid of
them.
So now you are ready to just pull the syringe straight back out.
So we've got the medicine drawn up and now we're ready to give the injection.
And we've already cleaned the surface and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make
a C with my thumb and index finger and basically put it down on the skin and kind of just pull
the skin taught and you don't necessarily, this is a muscle shot and so you don't have
to pinch up on the skin or anything.
So I'm just going to kind of pull it taught and then I'm going to take this and you can
hold it some people hold it like a dart like they're going to throw a dart, you can hold
it somehow like a pencil if you're going to hold a pencil and write so again whatever
you feel comfortable with.
So as I'm going in I'm going to go straight in basically at a 90 degree angle and I'm
going to go ahead and just push in and you're going to go all the way down to the hub of
the needle basically you are going to cover up all the needle with the skin.
So here I actually take this C and I brace my pinky against the skin and I grab it with
my thumb and index finger.
That way it is stable and you're not wobbling around as you're pushing down into the medicine
and you won’t hopefully it won’t be painful for the patient if you do that.
So' I've got it stable here where I'm not going to move the syringe just as I'm pushing
the medicine in.
So then I just take this free hand and I grab it here and I push the medicine into the skin.
And you don't have to go real slow, and you don't have to go real fast, if you just go
at a gentle pace then you basically are done and you let go of the syringe at the surface
of the skin and you just pull straight back out, and you’re done.
You can actually take the alcohol swab if you want and go ahead and massage that area.
It actually helps the medicine get more absorbed into the body.
And if it’s bleeding you might want to apply a band aid.
Some people don't bleed, some people do bleed.
A lot of people who are on blood thinners might bleed and probably do need a band aid.
The most common area for a patient if they are giving it to themselves would be on the
outside of your thigh.
On the lateral side of your thigh.
If you take your hand and you go from your knee up to your groin area and you divide
that into three sections it's going to be that middle third section where you can get
that shot to.
After you complete the injection then you need to make sure you properly dispose of
the needle.
And you can use many household items such as a milk carton with a lid.
You can actually use a liquid detergent bottle that has a lid or you can also use a coffee
can with a lid.
As long as they have lids and they are secure where people can't reach in and get them and
or they can puncture through the surface of the container.