Defective syringe beware

I have been using Easy Touch .3cc (30u) syringes from Amazon. Normally they work well.

I found two of them in a row that were not calibrated correctly. With the plunger pushed in all the way, they were at the .5unit mark. I used them allowing for a correction factor, many times my cat will use 1-1.5u and loosing a half unit is important. I am going to do a better job going forward.

Look at your syringes before you use them and make sure they bottom at zero.

 

There is a recall out for some syringes, but I do not think this is the same brand. It's scary to think of how much a syringe can be miscalibrated when we're talking about such tiny amounts.

 

The markings being offset is not that uncoimmon. I give less than 1 uniut to one of my cats and I have to insect each sringe to make sure I take into account any offset.

 

Larry is spot on, I think it is actually more common than not for them to be inconsistent to one another.

What I have always done is have one "reference syringe" that is kept in the same bowl in the fridge as the insulin. The reference syringe is just a syringe that I have clipped the needle off of and I have a piece of blue tape on it (the blue tape doesn't mark the dosage, it just makes sure that I can see it easily and that I don't throw it away by accident). Whenever I adjust my dosage up or down according to protocol, I always change it on my reference syringe first. Then for every dose I draw up, I make sure it matches the reference syringe by holding them side by side. The other advantage is that, if there are two or more people in the house drawing up dosages at different times, you don't have to have the conversation of "for 1 unit, do you put the plunger centered in the middle of the 1 tick mark, or above it, or below it, or...?". Plus, if there is ever an emergency, my emergency cat sitters know just by looking at my reference syringe what our current dose is without having to find my paper logbook or my online spreadsheet, and they know to match to it too.