Handling and measurement
Reconstitution
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Adding liquid to a freeze-dried powder so it becomes a solution you can draw into a syringe. You pierce the stopper, let the liquid run down the inside wall of the vial rather than straight onto the powder, and then leave it to dissolve. The amount of material in the vial is fixed and adding liquid does not change it. What the liquid decides is how much of the vial's contents ends up in each millilitre.
Why it matters here
This single step sets the concentration for the whole vial, and every number read off a syringe afterwards depends on it. The volume you added is also the one figure written nowhere on the vial, so if it is not recorded at the time it is gone, and the vial becomes a liquid of unknown strength.
What it is not
Adding more liquid does not make the vial weaker in the sense of containing less. The same amount of material is spread through more liquid, so each mark on the syringe carries less of it while the vial total is unchanged. More water is an arithmetic change, not a change in what you received.
Also called
- reconstitution
- reconstitute
- reconstituting
- recon
- reconning
- mixing
- adding water
Recon and reconning are the everyday shortenings. Mixing is used loosely for the same step, which is unhelpful, because the actual instruction is not to mix it vigorously.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.