Would I want to do a .02mg injection with the 6.77mg vial as well?
I assume your dose is 0.2 mg, not 0.02 mg. That would be a very low sema dose. But whatever your desired
dose in
milligrams is, the amount in the vial is a separate matter.
What complicates it is that you must dilute the stuff in the vial with bacteriostatic water, and how much of that to use is another value you control. Only when you have all these values can you figure out what to put into a syringe.
All you need to succeed is a little arithmetic. It is confusing at first but I encourage you to look up some help and figure it out, so that when you use a calculator you can verify that it works correctly. A calculator should be a convenience. If you trust it blindly, a misunderstanding can lead you to make a dosing error.
I would look at it like this:
First, figure out the mg per mL in your vial -- that is the concentration.
For example, if you have a 5 mg vial to which you add 2 mL bacteriostatic water, your vial contains 2.5 mg/mL. That's easy to see, right? You can also see that vial contains 25 0.2 mg doses (5 mg / 0.2 mg/dose).
Now, how do you figure out what goes in a syringe?
Divide the desired DOSE in mg by the concentration of the VIAL in mg/mL.
0.2 mg / 2.5 mg/mL = 0.08 mL
And you can verify that 0.08 mL is 1/25th of 2 mL, so we must have it right because we know the vial has 25 0.2 mg doses in it.
The last trick is converting mL to units. A unit is just 1/100 mL and syringes are marked that way to make the numbers bigger and easier to read. Therefore, 0.08 mL * 100 = 8 units.
Do not mix these up.
Go through these calculations with the exact values you have and see what you get. Make sure it makes sense.
There is one more complication to factor in. The actual amount in your vial is not going to be an even number like 10 mg. Look at your test report -- you have a test report, right? It will provide one or more weights. Use the average of the weights as the true amount in the vial. For example, a kit of 10 mL vials may test at 11.4, 11.3, 11.4 mg. That averages out to 11.4 mg and so you will assume that each vial in the kit actually contains that amount, not 10 mg.
The very last thing to think about is this: is the amount in the syringe
physically reasonable? If you have 100 unit (1 mL) syringes, 8 units is a bit hard to measure accurately. You may want to get smaller syringes -- they come in 30, 50, and 100 units. In a smaller syringe the marks are farther apart and easier to read.
You can also add more BAC to the vial so that the shot volume is bigger. 2 mL BAC is a standard reasonable value but you're in control. A vial can fit about 2.5 mL easily. Do not be afraid to tinker with this amount so that your shot volume is an easy to measure number, like a multiple of 5. If you get 3 mL syringes for your BAC then it is pretty easy to fine-tune that number too.
