Hello, I have ready all of the above posts and all are relevant, but I may have mislead you when I said about annual medical checkups. We get very good support from our diabetic medical team and my son - Harry has HBA1C's, foot checks, site checks, weight, height, blood pressure, urine test etc every 12 weeks. The medical checks that he gets annually are for his eyes, and cholesterol and a couple more things.
One of the previous posters articulated my feelings exactly with the explanation of a teenagers life. Harry is extremely sporty and its very hard to get constant good levels when we have to change dosages almost every other day depending on how active he is, has been, or will be!! He is pretty cooperative when it comes to testing daily, he does a minimum of 4 a day.
We eat really healthily, he alternates between 8 injection sites and his consultant agrees that we are doing absolutely everything correctly and that sometimes it is just bordering on impossible to get tight control on some pre-adults, due to many of the things listed in the posts above.
We are pretty clued up on diabetes, there are 4 of our immediate family with the condition, all have pretty tight control even though they are not half as 'good' as Harry. The difference is they are all above 40 and live routine, easily controlled lives.
Sorry to ramble on, but we have spent at least 5 years since his diagnosis worried, hung up, frustrated and anguished trying to get good HBA1c and it is something we have to let up on a bit.