Relentless Inquiry

I'm giving this 'tight control' thing a try. What a pain! And I'm getting irked with crunching the numbers by hand, too. But fortunately, there's technology for that.

I currently use a LifeScan Ultra, which I like because it take so little blood to test. I was looking at a diabetes site today and saw an ad for the LifeScan UltraSmart meter, which has all kinds of tracking stuff it can do. Right now I'm writing down all my tests and food stuff on the computer, but it's hard to make sense of the raw numbers. With the UltraSmart, you can tell it if your food entry is breakfast, lunch, dinner. You can add a keyword or phrase to an entry from a little menu, like that you 'feel hypo' or are having your period, or you are ill. You can also record exercise type and duration, so later you can see which kinds are affecting your numbers.

Plus there are all kinds of little charts and stuff– they have an online example story of a woman who didn't make her a1c target, and used one of the charts to see that it was her after-dinner reading that was consistently off, while earlier meals were ok.

To make a long story short, I found the UltraSmart metering kit online via Froogle (www.froogle.com) at a place called Hocks Pharmacy, for $39 + shipping, like $45 total. It's item number 4587499 at http://www.hocks.com. Other prices were in the $75 to $120 range– I think Hocks is using it as a loss leader to get the relationship in place so they can sell supplies. But I'm happy to buy the meter!