I know that I’m a little late to the Strip Safely party, but I have been reading as many posts from others about their concerns with meter accuracy and the great grassroots campaign that has been created by several members of the Diabetes Community. After a high blood sugar that occurred yesterday, I felt that today would be the best time to write about it due to the large inaccuracies from yesterday.
After sitting at the Social Security Administration for two hours in order to get Amanda’s last name changed, we were hungry and tired and decided to grab fast food. While we were dining in, I went to the bathroom to take a shot of insulin with a syringe, and the insulin vial dropped and shattered all over the floor. I figured that I would just eat and then go home and take insulin right away, it would only be a 15 minute difference. Well, that was a bad idea, I can tell you that. Two hours later my BG was 475….well that was the first test. I tested again about two seconds later and the meter read 398. Well, either way that’s high, but I was not very happy with the big difference. Maybe there was something wrong with the meter, or strips, or who knows what. But what I do know is that there is some serious inaccuracy there.
For me, a difference in taking 5 units of insulin vs 10 units of insulin is not going to make much of a difference because I use so much insulin. But, when I think about children that may only take 10 units of insulin a day, then that difference of 5 units based off of an inaccuracy is life threatening, even though that difference fits within the range allowed by governmental guidelines.
If test strips weren’t so expensive, then maybe I wouldn’t mind the need to test my sugar 2-3 times every time so that I could try and get an accurate number. But when the insurance covers 6 tests a day, that doesn’t mean 12-18 test strips, but only 6. I can’t afford to test several times because I don’t trust that my meter is right.
I encourage you to head on over to Strip Safely and read what all the others have been saying about this campaign and what you can do in order to become involved as well. There are sample letters that you can send to Congress, FDA or more.