Measuring your Blood Sugar is one of your new daily habits that you need to get used to and it is important to know how to do it right. There are two types of measurements: continuous and periodical. The continuous will be the daily values that you get from different devices. The periodical will be a blood sample test to establish your A1c or HbA1c (different names for the same procedure). This is an accurate, average of your last 3 months of BS movements. Your goal is to drop it under 5.7 mmol/l and keep those values without any medication. It is possible, trust me! It takes time, be patient, just keep on going!
There are several devices to help you find out your BS levels. Today we are only going to discuss the Glucometer.
Very important: the glucometer will only give you an estimate value! It has a marge of error up to 15% even 20% therefore it is needless for you to poke your fingers several times, get different readings as the values will be always different one from the other. Just consider the first number that you got and live your day. Plus that sugar it is needed to provide energy to all your cells in your body hence you will not have two equal readings.
When should you do your readings?
Upon waking up (immediately after you washed your hands), before meal and two hours after eating, and if you inject insulin, then you’ll have to do one more reading before going to bed.
- Upon waking up: there are two facts that can influence your morning numbers: dawn phenomenon and your previous day dinner. In the first case, the numbers are high! It takes a few months till you will get them to normal levels. In the second case, BS can be low, normal or high so it only depends on you to adjust your dinner accordingly.
- Before meal and two hours after eating: during eating your blood sugar starts to increase, this is the natural course of the BS. Sometime between 30 to 45 minutes after eating, your BS curve will hit its high and it will start going down again. For a healthy person, within an hour, BS gets to the before eating value. For a diabetic person it takes two hours. At this point, if your BS is 30 points or more higher than your before meal value, that food caused you a spike and you should adjust it accordingly next time. I’d like to precise that the “30 points” difference is not an official value! You will never find it on any official site! It is a threshold that the diabetic community established to keep the numbers on track.
- Before going to sleep: if your on insulin only (!), you should take our BS so you will know if you have to take action in order to prevent a hypoglycemia during the night. Unless your T1 (type 1), you should not change your insulin dosage too often… You should rather eat something if your numbers are lower than usual.
8 steps to do your BS reading:
- wash your hands; do not use alcohol to disinfect because it will alter your reading!
- prepare your pen: replace the lancet (the needle). Normally you should do it every time you do a reading. Set the pen at medium poking (there should be numbers between 1 and 5 that you can adjust according to your skin thickness. The needle has to go through your skin so the blood can come out). Charge the pen!
- the fingers to test recommended by WHO are the two middle ones… the others are also okay if the middle ones become painful.
- put the stripe into the glucometer and let the it get ready for the reading.
- poke your finger and let the first drop come out. Wipe it off. Use the second drop to do the reading: just put it on the stripe.
- the glucometer will give you your estimate value at that very moment.
- right it down in your diary!
- dispose the needle, the lancet into a sharps container.
Here it is another video for the same procedure, this time with a charismatic guy that explains the steps: