Serum Blood Draw-First Time Nervous Newbie

[farmgirl]

Wow Cali, quite the story I do hope the drops help after all that but YOU DID IT!! Yay for you....cheers...F/G

[Cali]

Just a quick update. The compounding pharmacy called to tell me they "overfilled" each vial. I am now to use each opened vial for 5 days, instead of what they told me when I picked them up, which was to use them for 3 days kept in the fridge then throw out.

To any newbie using getting serum drops for the first time, here's what I learned:
1. You need to be actively involved in the process.
2. You need to know what % serum you are getting, 100%, 50%, 20%, etc.
3. You need to know how many vials of blood the lab needs to draw to produce the amount of prescribed serum. Count them yourself when the lab tech finishes.
4. You need to know the size of the vials the lab tech will use to produce the amount of prescribed serum (they come in ml sizes, find out if they are 10ml, 4ml, etc.).
5. You need to know how many days supply this will net you. Note, this way you can have them draw more blood if you want more serum.
6. You need to know how much serum yields from each vial of blood (and the size of each blood vial). Basically #3 again.
7. You need to know what sized dropper the compounding pharmacy will provide the serum in, and how many days you can keep it in the fridge after opening.
8. If you're prone to getting sick while donating blood, ask for them to draw the blood with you laying prone on a table. This way, they won't need to drag you to a gurney if you go down.
9. As others mentioned earlier, hydrate well for 3 days prior, eat breakfast or lunch before your draw, bring some juice and/or power bar to get your blood sugar back up.
10. It's worth it!

Read SAAG and SMPCC posts above. They both know the exact details of their draws:
-SAAG: They draw 117 ml of blood (that's 13 vials containing 9 ml each), because for me, that makes about 50ml of 100% serum and lasts about 3 months.
-SMPCC: (5 x 10ml tubes - i.e., red tubes) I got 28 days of 100% serum (based on using one drop in each eye four times per day).

I didn't understand what this meant until now. I think it's important to know your numbers so you can control the process. Going forward I plan to be like SAAG and SMPCC and know my numbers as well.

[spmcc]

One other thing to know... 100% serum can be very thick. And sometimes it's too thick to come out of the dropper vial. I believe this is one reason why saline/BSS is added to create serum mixtures of 80%, 50% etc.

I don't know how others have worked around their plugged-up dropper vials! I assume a pin down the hole to clear the obstruction is NOT a good idea! For me, I ended up not being able to get some of the serum out and threw the vial away before using it all.

There are pros and cons to it all.

[Guest]

For clogged bottles: usually if I give it a very vigorous shake or two, the clog dislodges and drops will come out again.

Also, I have a theory - there are always a few bottles where I can see what looks like a tiny bit of red floating around in the serum - for me, these are the bottles that I tend to have trouble with clogging - makes me thing that red stuff is what's clogging it - I assume a few red blood cells made their way into the serum when the pharmacist was trying to draw off the serum for transfer to eyedrop bottles.