Just after I had finished writing my first post, my husband came in surprisingly early from work and said, “Get your Glad Rags on, I’m taking you out to lunch!” I’m afraid I only glanced apologetically at the box of Almased as I leapt out the door to one of the local eateries. I did choose a chicken salad as the main course but the caramel apple pie with vanilla ice-cream screamed out for a last stand and once I’d folded, well, the rest of the day was just disastrous. Waking up this morning with the high sugar headache urged me towards finding the blood monitor though.
That was easier said than done! I found plenty of empty blood monitor bags; for somebody who never takes their blood if they can help it, I seem to have bought quite a number of them! Eventually I managed to find an Accu-chek Compact which only needed new batteries and a new cassette. The next trial was to find a finger pricker and needle which matched. Finally I had everything together so, after throwing all the out of date cassettes in the bin, I slipped the new cassette into the monitor. Lots of satisfactory whirring ensued followed by a most unsatisfactory error message, E-2. I just knew there was no chance of finding the instructions so I reinserted the cassette numerous times with the same result before trying another cassette. Still no joy so I retrieved an out of date cassette and tried that. Perfect but unreliable. However, maybe it had kickstarted things? I reinserted the in date cassette…no such luck.
Next I tried a One Touch kit I had found in the car. It was all beautifully packaged (I’d fallen in love with it’s pink monitor) but I couldn’t get a dickie bird out of it. Mmm, all these monitors, and no way of measuring my blood sugars.
In desperation I rang Accu-chek, giving them the serial number, where they immediately told me that my model had been superceded TWICE so the cassettes were never going to work. I was really impressed though when the gentleman from Roche offered to send me the latest model for free within 3 to 5 working days. I mean, it meant I might have to start without measuring my blood sugars accurately (or another voice in my head was saying wait a little bit longer before starting) but a FREE monitor, that’s brilliant. Details given, I put the phone down and started to get ready to take blood but was startled by the phone ringing again with a very apologetic gentleman saying that the monitor was out of stock but would be here in 4 weeks time. FOUR WEEKS! Disappointment didn’t even begin to describe how I felt.
Fortunately, I have a lovely husband who rang round until he found the right monitor before going down the road to buy it for me. By this time, having started trying to get ready at breakfast, it was past lunchtime so I was able to start on the best blood reading I’ve probably had in a long time…4.4mmol!
Anyway, in order not to fail due to hunger, I made the first shake up with milk. The taste was bearable but the texture was very powdery despite doing it in the blender. I will obviously have to work on that, maybe make it with some ice.
