How are blood sugar levels tested?
What's really nice about diabetes is that you can watch over your disease yourself at home. And we have these blood glucose monitoring devices now, which there are probably, I don't know, 2, 3, 5, lots and lots of different meters. It doesn't matter necessarily so much which one you have, but you need to have one that you understand how to use: A), and B): in many cases that your insurance pays for. But you want to be able to monitor your blood sugar so you know what your sugar level is. And so these machines require that you poke your finger with a lancing device, and the lancing device you just - it's like a little pin prick. And I might add this is actually slightly more painful than giving insulin shots. This is part of diabetes that a lot of people don't like, but it gives very useful information. But you poke your finger and then there's a machine that has a little strip in it. You touch that strip to the drop of blood, and within a few seconds it tells you what your blood sugar level is. And I find these invaluable in terms of blood sugar testing. Now the problem with this is that, say you test your blood sugar four times a day before each time you eat, so you can figure out how much insulin to give, or maybe after you eat, so you can figure out what your blood sugar did in response to a meal. That still leaves lots of time when you have no idea what your blood sugar is, and it can be going up and down or whatever in between. So we now have ways to monitor blood sugar levels continuously by little devices that you attach on to your skin that talk to a device like a pager and tell you what your blood sugar is all the time. And those devices are just new, but they're really fascinating and really helpful in managing people who take insulin injections.
