The December 19, 2017
PinFeed Almanack
Units

  A sick cat can take a person down an unfamiliar rabbit-hole of words like
  Langerhans, Krebs, Cushing, and Khadijah.  And plain old 'unit' gets overloaded
  like a Java function; that was a surprise.  Depending on the medicine, a unit
  might be .0001 L, or .00004 L, or maybe something else.  
  
  Strictly speaking, it wasn't confusion over the size of a unit that caused 
  Frankie's first tenfold overdose, but the effect was the same. 
  
  The rule is, only use U-40 syringes for U-40 insulin, and U-100 syringes for
  U-100 insulin.  Not real magic, just the social problem of graduating a vial
  according to the concentration of the solution.  But it was confusing enough to
  start a G-rated web search, which led to some R-rated results from an
  exceptional communicator named Kadijah. 
  
  Google, 'CC vs unit'?  
  
  Khadijah, from Bluelight.org:  (picture of a syringe, with 100 hash-marks)
  
  ONE of those, is ONE CC. 100 UNITS.
  
  The little numbers are the UNITS.  So, if you draw up water to the line that
  says 40, you got 40 UNITS, not 40 cc's.  Think about it.  Quads and street
  bikes, their engines measured in cc's.  Imagine a 450cc street bike.  If one cc
  is equal to one unit, (not true, but that is the common misunderstanding), in
  that case imagine how small the engine would be.  the size of four needles full
  of water (in cubic inches.) Maybe that can help some ppl remember, i dont know. 
  
  It aint a real big deal, but peeps need to remember this shit becuz at some time
  the information might make a difference in harm reduction.  Say a certain amount
  of a liquid is fatal.  A person who refers to units as cc's might say "oh you
  can inject up to 10 cc's of this and be safe, anything over is deadly." They
  meant ten units, but they referred to the measurement wrong.  So its really that
  ten units is deadly,not ten cc's.  Well now say the injecter actually knows wat
  a cc is, so he boots up say, one cc and overdoses.  Becuz the person giving the
  info meant ten units, not ten syringe fulls.  Of course that is just a
  theoretical situation but i aint just bein a grammar nazi when I ask that ppl
  try and remember the difference here.  It might not matter most of the time, but
  if a uneducated person reading the forums for help reads directions about a
  certain amount of cc's when the poster is wrongly referring to units as cc's it
  could cause harm so I thought maybe t his might be helpful in some way.  if not,
  then ban me lol. 
  
  The takeaways:
  
    - the Web can teach you many things;
  
    - units mean what Humpty-Pharma intended, nothing more and nothing less, but
    they're always tiny;
  
    - if you have only a u-40 syringe, divide your u-100 dose by 2.5;  
  
    - wear glasses so as not to read 20 for 2.0;
  
    - you can't kill Frankie with a 10x overdose. 
  
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