Gotta love technology!
Lately I've been thinking about our finger stick blood sugar monitors... I'm been reading at different sites that the number we get when we test our blood is actually quite arbitrary. Test twice in one minute and you'll get two different results, which sometimes vary quite a bit.
On Friday evening my husband and I had a wonderful dinner from a new "Good Carb" cookbook my mom got me for Christmas. Beef and spinach burritos! I'll have to post the recipe, because it's great! Anyway, as the cookbook suggests, it's pretty low carb and I went in to dinner with a 92 mg/dl. Great! I gave myself 3 units of insulin and fully expected to need a bedtime snack. We settled in to watch "Super Size Me"- if you haven't seen this film, you have to watch it! We don't eat much fast food as it is, but now I will NEVER eat the junk! It's so sad that the high fat, refined carb food industry spends billions of dollars advertising their products, thus people get fat and have all the corresponding health problems... meanwhile our health care system is falling apart. This is not a good equation!
Anyway... after the movie it's 10 p.m. time for my lantus and my bedtime blood glucose check. It rang in at 305 mg/dl!! What?! First of all I felt kinda low, well not super low, but like I'd need a snack before bed. This couldn't be right. I joked to my husband "maybe the film about all that crappy food actually raised my blood sugar!" I didn't believe my meter so I tested again... 94 mg/dl... yeah, that's more like it. I tested a third time just to make sure. That one was 95. Okay, confirmed.
How crazy is that?! I'm so glad I didn't trust my meter and give myself a correction dose. I would've gone to bed and totally bottomed out. Crazy!
On Friday evening my husband and I had a wonderful dinner from a new "Good Carb" cookbook my mom got me for Christmas. Beef and spinach burritos! I'll have to post the recipe, because it's great! Anyway, as the cookbook suggests, it's pretty low carb and I went in to dinner with a 92 mg/dl. Great! I gave myself 3 units of insulin and fully expected to need a bedtime snack. We settled in to watch "Super Size Me"- if you haven't seen this film, you have to watch it! We don't eat much fast food as it is, but now I will NEVER eat the junk! It's so sad that the high fat, refined carb food industry spends billions of dollars advertising their products, thus people get fat and have all the corresponding health problems... meanwhile our health care system is falling apart. This is not a good equation!
Anyway... after the movie it's 10 p.m. time for my lantus and my bedtime blood glucose check. It rang in at 305 mg/dl!! What?! First of all I felt kinda low, well not super low, but like I'd need a snack before bed. This couldn't be right. I joked to my husband "maybe the film about all that crappy food actually raised my blood sugar!" I didn't believe my meter so I tested again... 94 mg/dl... yeah, that's more like it. I tested a third time just to make sure. That one was 95. Okay, confirmed.
How crazy is that?! I'm so glad I didn't trust my meter and give myself a correction dose. I would've gone to bed and totally bottomed out. Crazy!
posted by Kelsey @ 9:34 AM
7 Comments:
At 10:29 AM,
Scott K. Johnson said…
Yikes! That is quite a difference!
Like you say - good thing you double checked! Do you think you may have had something on your finger, or ??
That's pretty scary. Imagine if you treated that "high bg"!
I recently watched that movie too - isn't it amazing! The other thing that got me was about the number of advertisements that our kids are exposed to. Something like 10 thousand a year - versus if we ate every meal with out kid, and at every meal we made a point to deliver some type of positive educational nutrition message to our kids, it would only add up to about 1000 of those messages. 1000 vs. 10,000. That too is scary. What an eye opener though!
Back to the testing - I can't think of any time where I've had results so out of whack that I've checked again. Or maybe I have had them and just didn't pay attention enough to double check it.
It's very disturbing because we usually trust our meters at first glance - without thinking much about it.
At 11:34 AM,
Kelsey said…
I figured something might have been on my finger, but then I'd used a scented hand sanitizer after doing the dishes, that wouldn't have sugar in it, would it?! Hmmm.
At 3:48 PM,
George said…
I had this happen once and I realized that it was becuase there was something on my hands. I know they say to clean your hands before your test but I honestly am in such a hurry I don't. I bet that was it.
Supersize Me should be required viewing for everyone. So scary but so important.
At 5:42 PM,
BetterCell said…
Hi Kelsey.....Most likely something sweet on your finger (your husband's kiss) caused the high number. You should also use a "testing solution" for your meter to check if it is working OK.
At 7:41 PM,
Rachel Segall said…
What kind of meter do you use? I use the freestyle flash and I personally thinks it sucks. I get mixed results ALL the time, same as what happened to you. I never got these discrepencies with my old meter.
Something weird that has happened before too is that I would test on one hand and get one reading then test a finger on the other hand and get a totally different reading.
It's so weird and frustrating!!!
At 12:12 PM,
Erica said…
kelsey the sanitizer could have done it! I've found that lotion gives me false high reading -even unscented. So I always wash my hands and test again before correcting.
Omg - supersize me was great! We don't eat fast food and I've never been more thankful. I was so amazed and totally grossed out.
At 10:06 AM,
Anonymous said…
my meter has done that loads. it''s scary.
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