glucose self-testing

After thinking it over for four days, and discussing it with your friends, doula, psychic chiropractor, and nurse practitioner, you decide you WILL take the 3-hour glucose tolerance test. At 5:45 p.m., on the evening before you plan to go in to the lab (and spend the rest of that day in bed) your doctor calls.

She’s decided it’s fine if you want to self test. Just get a glucometer and test four times-a-day: when you wake up and one hour after each meal.

What will you do now? The idea of being on the same page with your doctor, rather than at odds, is calming. The idea that you have a choice in your own medical care, heady.

You go to swim class. You tell your friends there that you are relieved to just not be upset about it anymore, but you aren’t sure what you will do.

You go home, tell your husband. You decide that you will try this self-empowered path, or at least see if the acquiring of the glucometer comes easily. After dinner, the two of you go to a 24-hour drugstore.

Store is open 24-hours, but the metal gates on the pharmacy are rolling down just as you walk up to the window. Fortunately, pharmacist (who has the key to the cabinet full of glucose testing equipment) takes pity on you. There are glucometers ranging in price from $15 to $80. Pharmacist says they’re all the same.

Each one comes with 10 test strips. You need to test 4 times a day for 3-4 days. The test strip refill boxes are the priciest part of the equation. It’s cheaper to buy two $15-glucometers (= 20 strips). You think yourself very clever in having figured this out. They only have one $15 one, but they have another that’s $16. Both are the same brand. You figure you’re golden. You buy the two and go home.

In bed, you open one of the meters, read every single instruction manual in the box (there are three). Your husband admires you for being so thorough.

In the morning, you try to do your first self test. At the end of one hour, in which time you’ve discovered that one box of test strips is defective, the two glucometers do not use the same type of strips, and that — after several tries — the best finger for getting a decent drop of blood really is your index finger, your bathroom looks like this:

In spite of it all, you actually get a reading. And one more, one hour after breakfast. At this point, you resolve to at least try to make it through the day, though you may need to get more test strips sooner rather than later…

And you decide that maybe, just maybe, you will go take that three hour test tomorrow…