Accepted answer
1.5 mL of solution, and the rest depends on your dose. A 15 mg vial reconstituted to 10 mg/mL occupies 15 ÷ 10 = 1.5 mL. At a 1 mg weekly dose that is 15 weeks; at 2.4 mg weekly it is 6 weeks — and both of those assume the vial contains its label claim, which is the assumption a content assay exists to test. Subtract one draw's dead space per dose: a few microlitres on a fixed-needle syringe, up to a hundred on a luer one.
It helps to be literal here: the arithmetic only stops being confusing once you work it through once and see that it is straightforward.
Worked example, because the general form is easier to trust once you have seen it once. Take a 10 mg vial and add 2 mL of diluent: the concentration is 10 ÷ 2 = 5 mg/mL. A 0.5 mg dose is 0.5 ÷ 5 = 0.1 mL. On a U-100 syringe, where 1 unit = 0.01 mL, that is 0.1 ÷ 0.01 = 10 units. Change the diluent to 1 mL and the same dose becomes 5 units — same dose, half the resolution.
Room temperature before drawing is worth the ten minutes. Cold solution is more viscous, draws slower, and condensation on a cold barrel makes it harder to read the meniscus.
The Arrhenius relationship for drawing kinetics means that cold solution takes noticeably longer to draw than room-temperature solution.
The caveat is that this assumes the vial contains what the label says, and if the content assay has not been done, the arithmetic is precise about an unknown quantity.
Write the arithmetic on the vial label. It costs nothing and removes the step where you reconstruct it from memory.
edited 10 Aug 2024 by orla_ferriter — fixed an arithmetic slip in the third paragraph
2I have seen exactly this failure mode twice and both times it was the diluent volume. – micron22 29 days ago Adding that a fixed-needle syringe loses about a tenth of what a luer one does. – unit_math 9 months ago add a comment