The methotrexate will stop the pregnancy and the level of pregnancy hormone in your blood should decrease over 2 to 4 days. Based on your blood test results, your doctor will tell you if you need another injection of methotrexate. Your doctor will likely want you to have a blood test 2 to 3 times a week, for 2 to 3 weeks. This is to tell if the methotrexate worked to stop the pregnancy. If you have nausea, sip clear fluids like ginger ale or soup broth. Try to drink often and eat small amounts of dry, starchy food like soda crackers every 15 minutes.
If you need to take pain medicine e. If you have any questions about medicine, talk to your doctor or pharmacist. To help relax the muscles that cause cramping, you can use a hot water bottle or a heating pad. Taking hot baths can also help. Based on these results we will let you know if you need a second dose. Then you will need your blood drawn once a week until your hCG test is negative.
There is a high chance of success. This means you will not need surgery. Your doctor will talk with you about your success rates. Make sure to use condoms or other contraception until you have 1 normal period after your hCG is negative.
Use of Health Topics. Call us right away if you: Have severe abdominal pain that keeps getting worse Are bleeding enough to soak a maxi pad each hour for 3 hours straight What is methotrexate? It is given by injection. You often only need 1 dose.
Sometimes you will need a second dose. What are the benefits? How often will I need follow up? There are a few different dosing regimens—a single injection, two doses three days apart, or multiple doses every other day for at least a week.
Which schedule of treatment your doctor chooses is in part based on how far along your pregnancy is, how high your pregnancy hormone levels are, and how large the ectopic pregnancy is on ultrasound. The further along in the pregnancy you are, the more doses of methotrexate you usually receive. After you get your first dose of methotrexate, your doctor is going to give you a very detailed schedule of when to come back for blood tests. These tests monitor the levels of your pregnancy hormone.
Even though your hormones may go up initially after you get the methotrexate, they should shortly thereafter start to come down. This can take as short as four weeks, but it can take up to three months depending on how long it takes for the pregnancy to resolve.
Your doctor may seem very obsessive, telling you about which days you must come back for testing. This focus on specific days reflects the knowledge that we have about how the hormone levels drop after methotrexate if the medication is working to treat an ectopic pregnancy.
If you miss one of these blood draws, your doctor needs to guess what the levels might have been. One of the reasons that a person might not choose methotrexate for ectopic pregnancy and may choose surgery is because it may be hard for her to come back on the schedule of days for the follow-up.
The most common side effect of methotrexate is some cramping belly pain.
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