Read the Label!!

I haven't written about our daily life with diabetes in quite a while. We seemed to get the hang of using the pump and even though it's not yet a year, it's actually hard to remember what things were like before Benny's diagnosis. A reminder this week that we're still learning. We check Benny's blood sugar (also called blood glucose or bg) several times a day, sometimes as many as 8-10 times during they day and even overnight. We use a lancet to prick his finger and get a drop of blood. That goes onto a test strip inserted in a meter, which gives us his bg number. Here's more info on how it all works. The test strips come in little cylindrical containers - they look almost like what 35mm film comes in. Each little container has a number on it. When you put the test strip into the meter, the same number should come up. On our meter you have to manually reset that number each time you change containers. After that, you just press "okay" on the meter when the number comes up. We been doing this for about 10 months now (wow) and we know the drill. Or so we thought. For about two and half days we were getting crazy bg numbers. 95 one hour, 405 an hour later when Benny hadn't eaten anything. Or 250 overnight and 350 in the morning. Just didn't make sense. We didn't know if the pump was broken or if the inset was off. Finally, Slade figured it out. Seems that when I changed from the #11 canister to the #17 canister I mixed up the numbers and never reset the meter. 17 looks just like 11, right? We got lucky. The only time Benny really got low was right after Slade figured out the problem and checked him. A quick juice box and we're off and running. More frustration, one night later. We usually check Benny about an hour after he falls asleep. I go into his room, hold a small flashlight in my mouth (I need both hands!), prick his finger and get the number. Then, if we need to, we treat him using the pump he wears 24/7. Believe it or not, he usually sleeps through it. This time, though, it took me five test strips, woke him up, he's telling me to give him the flashlight, he wants to turn it off. Aarrgh!! At least the number was great when I finally got it.