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Tag: testing blood sugar

Life of a Diabetic Has Been Busy

Chris Stocker 2 Comments

The life of this diabetic has been crazy busy over the last few days.  This new work schedule is finely starting to feel normal, and I must admit, I actually like the schedule.  Let’s take a look at how my new day goes:

7:00 a.m. – Alarm goes off

7:15 a.m. – I actually wake up

7:15 a.m. – test blood sugar

7:20 a.m. – coffee, breakfast, shower

8:00 a.m. – hitting the road for my commute

8:45 a.m. – get to work and test sugar again to see how breakfast was holding up

11:00 a.m. – test sugar to see if correction was good

12:30 p.m. – test sugar because it is lunch time soon

2:30 p.m. – test sugar to see how good my bolus was

5:30 p.m. – test sugar once more because I am getting ready to leave at 6 to drive home

7:00 p.m. get home from work and go for a quick walk

7:30 p.m. – get home from walk, start to cook, eat and cleanup dinner

9:00 p.m. log into blog, check out comments, attempt to respond to twitter comments

10:00 p.m. – check sugar

12:30 a.m – laying in bed trying to fall asleep to start the same thing over the next day.

There is not one time throughout the day that I hate that busy schedule.  I absolutely love it.  Living a schedule like this with type 1 diabetes or any disease in that matter can start to wear on your health if you are not taking care of yourself properly.  I try to force myself to test my blood sugar during these times because I know that I will forget to do it.  I set the alarm on my pump now, I have never used that alarm before in my life.  I think it might annoy my co-workers, but nobody has said anything yet.  They are all usually listening to music anyway, so I don’t think they even notice.

Tonight I am going to be up later because I have a lot of other things to take care of, lots and lots of e-mails I haven’t responded to in almost 3-4 days.  So if you e-mailed me, sorry I will get to it tonight, promise.

Time for that energy drink.

Have a great Friday tomorrow everybody.

How Do You Log Your BG?

Chris Stocker 1 Comment

Last week I was asked what my average blood sugar was and I could not give a good answer.  I thought, hmm I can look in my pump, but wait, I don’t always input my sugars into there.  So then, maybe I can look at my meter, but oh yea, I use about 4 different meters so those averages would not be accurate.  Finally, I thought I can look in my logbook, but unfortunately it hasn’t been touched in about 3 years.  I’ve made plenty attempts to use an excel sheet but then I started just writing numbers all over the place and never in the right place.  I decided to start using a logbook again.

Right now I am just using the Bayer one that came with the Didget meter.  I am going to take it old school for about a month and write down every sugar, the time, and how many carbs with how many units of insulin that I am taking.  I had put a question out on Twitter to see how many of you still used a pen and pencil logbook and some of the answers I received were expected, “What is pen and paper?”.  Even though I am an internet marketing guy, pen and paper to me still use what works best.  Eventually I will probably switch over to using the iPhone to record all of my sugars, but I’m not to that point yet.

Logging my blood sugars is something that I haven’t been very good at doing since I was diagnosed.  I recorded every single blood sugar for about a year, but then I became too comfortable with my diabetes and didn’t do it as well. I thought, what’s the point of recording them, if I can keep good numbers it doesn’t make a difference.  Or I can just upload the results to the computer, but then I started using multiple meters and couldn’t get a good, accurate average.

I am also going back to testing 10 times a day and knowing what is going on with my blood sugars at all times.  I have about 6-7 CGM sensors left that expired a few months ago, but I am going to give them a shot anyway and see how accurate they are. To end this post, I am going to ask for your help and just answer a few questions in the comments:

  1. What logbook do you use?
  2. What app on iPhone do you use?
  3. What computer software do you use to log blood sugars?
  4. Do you log food info along with blood sugars?

I appreciate your help with this.