How to check diabetes blood glucose painlessly
Gestational Diabetes is a special type of diabetes that occurs in some women during pregnancy. Women diagnosed with gestational diabetes are required to check their blood glucose level many times a day. In our case, it was 4 times a day. In the morning after waking up, after the breakfast, lunch and finally the dinner. It has to be taken one hour after the meal. The way to check the blood glucose using the current state of the art technology is to poke the finger with a lancet and get a small droplet of blood out, insert a special test strip into the meter and put the blood into this strip. Then comes a magic number that is the blood glucose.The most painful part of this process obviously is to poke the finger and get a small drop of blood. If this is an occasional feat, then it's not a problem. But if one were to do 4 times a day and for several months, then it gets a bit tiring. There are a few techniques I learned along the way and they are passed along to you here.
- Capillary action Because the blood needs to go into the strip, you might try to "pour" your blood drop
into the strip. Don't do this. The test strip has a small slit that uses the
capillary action.
Capillary action makes the fluid to raise in level. So, the right way to make your blood go into the strip is to put
it vertical and put the finger with a small drop of blood below it. This will avoid drawing more blood from your finger
than necessary.
- Left & Right, Odd & Even Another problem with daily checking of blood glucose is to remember which hand and finger to poke with the lancet. At 4 times a day, it would be 120 times a month and with just 10 fingers, that's several times a finger. Not to mention, some use only 8 fingers (ignoring the thumbs). So, if you don't follow a systematic approach, you would end up poking the same finger and hand more times making them sore. You can address this problem using a simple method. Each day is an odd or even day. Like the 1st of May is odd and the 4th of May is even. So, you can use right hand on the odd day and left hand on the even day. Further, you can use the 4 fingers of the hand for the 4 times of poking a day. This makes the poking uniform and less painful.
- Using keyboard If you spend time a lot of time on the computer, it becomes even more painful to poke the fingers and type on the keyboard through out the day at work. You can carefully observe the surface of your fingers that touch the keyboard while typing and avoid poking in that area. Usually poking to the sides help, but if you want to be more precise, you can put a wet cloth on a table and type on it with your fingers and see the area on the finger that got wet. This will not be precise, but gives you an idea about what part of the finger to avoid poking. I guess a similar approach can be adopted by those who play music instruments like a piano.