- Messages
- 24
- Type of diabetes
- Prediabetes
Greetings everyone. I am from China but I studied in the UK, so I always consider it my second hometown.
A few weeks ago, I started to feel really bad. Routines were the same every day, but I woke up in the morning with dry eyes and a bitter-taste mouth. After breakfast, I felt very tired and my heart was beating strangely. Then, after lunch, more pees. And then, no more sound sleep at night. Pee pee and pee. A couple weeks later, my feet and hands sometimes felt numbness and that tingling thing. I knew I had to visit a doctor.
Overall, I'd say I'm quite fit. 1.78 meters tall with a BMI of 21. I do exercise once or twice a day with dumbbells and kettlebells. I eat lots of vegetables. I also eat one or two apples or one banana a day. I can't even imagine I could be diabetic.
In China, we don't have GPs. We go to a hospital and bet we will have luck to have a good doctor to see our problems.
After I spent two full days at the hospital (most time waiting for results) and many blood and urine tests, she decides I am not diabetic: Fasting blood sugar at 6.65 mmol/L and HbA1C at 5.9%. All other tests show my blood sugar is normal (but I suspect the results!!) When I suggest to her that maybe I'm prediabetic she looks puzzled. Maybe she's not trained to give advice to people developing a serious condition. No surprise to me at all. I know how our doctors work!
Anyway, I decide to take things back into my own hands and start to fight it combining lifestyle change. I bought a meter (Onetouch Ultra Easy. Unfortunately, we don't have the latest meters here) and started to monitor my blood sugar since yesterday.
Things seem to be good (my readings are constantly between 4.4-6.2 mmol/L, until this afternoon my two-hour after lunch reading spikes to 7.5 mmol/L and spirals to 3.1 mmol/L after 30-minute exercise. I'm sure I have no hypoglycemia and I'm still full of energy. I'm also well-hydrated. So the readings lead me to think all my previous readings could be inaccurate!!!
I searched online and found some articles saying OneTouch meters could be 30% lower than the real reading. If so, 3.1 mmol/L could be over 4 mmol/L and my previous 'normal' range of 4.4-6.2 could be 5.72-8.06 mmol/L!! That's very very scary because they are misleading me.
Maybe I'll start a new thread in a relevant forum to ask how people interpret their meter results. But for now, if any of you have similar experiences or would like to share your insights, I'd really appreciate it.
For now, I'll have to go to a Johnson & Johnson's care centre and have my meter tested or calibrated. That'll be a 10+ mile trip. In China, they don't send out free calibration fluid to end users outside Shanghai where it is based.
A few weeks ago, I started to feel really bad. Routines were the same every day, but I woke up in the morning with dry eyes and a bitter-taste mouth. After breakfast, I felt very tired and my heart was beating strangely. Then, after lunch, more pees. And then, no more sound sleep at night. Pee pee and pee. A couple weeks later, my feet and hands sometimes felt numbness and that tingling thing. I knew I had to visit a doctor.
Overall, I'd say I'm quite fit. 1.78 meters tall with a BMI of 21. I do exercise once or twice a day with dumbbells and kettlebells. I eat lots of vegetables. I also eat one or two apples or one banana a day. I can't even imagine I could be diabetic.
In China, we don't have GPs. We go to a hospital and bet we will have luck to have a good doctor to see our problems.
After I spent two full days at the hospital (most time waiting for results) and many blood and urine tests, she decides I am not diabetic: Fasting blood sugar at 6.65 mmol/L and HbA1C at 5.9%. All other tests show my blood sugar is normal (but I suspect the results!!) When I suggest to her that maybe I'm prediabetic she looks puzzled. Maybe she's not trained to give advice to people developing a serious condition. No surprise to me at all. I know how our doctors work!
Anyway, I decide to take things back into my own hands and start to fight it combining lifestyle change. I bought a meter (Onetouch Ultra Easy. Unfortunately, we don't have the latest meters here) and started to monitor my blood sugar since yesterday.
Things seem to be good (my readings are constantly between 4.4-6.2 mmol/L, until this afternoon my two-hour after lunch reading spikes to 7.5 mmol/L and spirals to 3.1 mmol/L after 30-minute exercise. I'm sure I have no hypoglycemia and I'm still full of energy. I'm also well-hydrated. So the readings lead me to think all my previous readings could be inaccurate!!!
I searched online and found some articles saying OneTouch meters could be 30% lower than the real reading. If so, 3.1 mmol/L could be over 4 mmol/L and my previous 'normal' range of 4.4-6.2 could be 5.72-8.06 mmol/L!! That's very very scary because they are misleading me.
Maybe I'll start a new thread in a relevant forum to ask how people interpret their meter results. But for now, if any of you have similar experiences or would like to share your insights, I'd really appreciate it.
For now, I'll have to go to a Johnson & Johnson's care centre and have my meter tested or calibrated. That'll be a 10+ mile trip. In China, they don't send out free calibration fluid to end users outside Shanghai where it is based.