I Always Knew I Was Going to Become Diabetic

It seems that all the older people in my family were diabetic: my father, my mother, and even my great grandmother. Now even my younger brother is borderline.

Each day, I have to give myself three shots of Humalog (Lispro) and one shot of Lantus (Glargine). The Humalog shots all come before or immediately after meals, and the Lantus just before going to sleep. That’s not so bad, because both types of insulin use a KwikPen with an extremely skinny needle. I administer the insulin either in my gut or my thigh, with only occasionally a bad stick that hits a nerve.

What is worse are the finger sticks, which I have to do three times a day before meals. I have to poke a lancet into my fingertips and squeeze out a bead of blood so that I can tap it with a test strip connected to a device that reads the glucose level of my blood at that point. The problem is that I have trouble getting enough blood to give me a reading. Sometimes I have to poke the same fingertip as much as three times to draw enough blood.

As if that weren’t bad enough, some of my fingers (left thumb and right thumb) require a thicker lancet in order to get blood. My left forefinger has sustained some damage from all the finger sticking, so I usually skip it altogether. So I do a 9-finger rotation over a three-day period.

I don’t mind going with pen needle, nibs, and insulin to a restaurant, but I refuse to also prick my fingertips at the same meal. After all, the finger sticks are for measuring, whereas the insulin keeps my blood sugar low.

The good news is that what I’m doing is working for me. My last A1C reading was 6.5; and my finger stick readings tend to be in the low 100s.