Until recently, I was hit or miss about doing hormone injections on time. This is not unusual; Maria Griffiths, the protagonist of canonical trans novel Nevada, does hers a week and a half late. (“It is very, very hard to inject yourself with a needle … The excitement that comes with the beginning of transition has worn off and now this is just a shitty thing she has to do to herself sometimes.”) We all must occasionally do something unpleasant that’s good for us in the long run — at some point, your adult brain overrules the impulse to avoid pain and you rip the Band-Aid off. Testosterone injections are one of those things for me, and although it’s hard to predictably make that Band-Aid rip happen, I’ve found that tipping the balance is easier than it seems. You don’t have to love or enjoy injections; they just have to be, in the net total, more rewarding than unpleasant.
There’s the mental block around injecting myself with a needle, which isn’t going away, but I realized that another reason for dragging my feet was the hassle of getting everything out and putting it away. Injections involve a lot of stuff: The first step is disinfecting the vial of testosterone and injection site with alcohol, then drawing up a dose into a syringe with a thick 18-gauge needle, then swapping out the tip for a 23-gauge needle, then injecting the solution into the fatty layer of tissue between skin and muscle. Sometimes there’s a bead of blood, so I’ll unwrap a Band-Aid. With everything in its own packaging — alcohol swabs, needle tips, syringes, Band-Aids, the vial itself — that’s a lot of boxes of stuff sprawled out on my table waiting for me to use it, then afterward, waiting to be put away. I wondered if consolidating those supplies into a kit might make injections less annoying and thus easier. A quick online search didn’t help — there are a lot of boxes and caddies out there, but most only list external dimensions; I had so many miscellaneous, different-size things that I’d need the measurements of each individual section. I found the most viable options at the Container Store, so I measured each item that would go in the kit — a 5.5-by-1.5-inch packet containing a syringe; 3.75-by-2.25-inch alcohol swabs — sketched them out, and took my notebook and tape measure to midtown one cloudy Friday afternoon. (For this kind of IRL shopping research, I try to bring the relevant item if it’s small enough, but I was not about to bring a handful of syringes into the Container Store.)
It took about ten minutes of poking around in the craft and hobby aisle to decide that this $5 ten-compartment, two-sided box was the solution. I also considered the Infinite Divider box, a modular option you split into sections via small dividers you buy separately; a small five-compartment box; and a battery storage case, but none had all the right dimensions. (The Infinite Divider system was my second-best option, but I balked at buying the dividers separately.) The box has two mirrored sides containing five segments each. Let me save you a trip by listing the dimensions:
- One large 8.25” L x 2.375” W x 0.875” H compartment
- One medium, deep 4” L x 2.375” W x 1.25” H compartment
- Three small, shallow 1.375” L x 2.375” W x 0.625” H compartments
Each side snaps shut, and you flip the box upside down to access the other side (you can open both sides at the same time, but things will fall out). Although the two-sided design isn’t a feature I sought out, I’ve found it useful for designating one side the “active” side, containing the vial I’m using and a full stock of supplies, and using the other as storage so I can refill the kit without rummaging in the closet for a box of alcohol swabs or needle tips. It’s compact, lightweight, and — most important — I don’t take psychic damage from it sitting on the kitchen table on an injection day. Needles still suck, but injections have gotten chiller and easier. (I did this week’s while building this article.) I’ve gone from three to four days of procrastination to zero to one — pretty good results for a $5 purchase.
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