Hi All,
I'm in reemission at moment and not going back to Diabetic Nurse until next May, but was wondering what is an easy way to check my levels at home say once every 2/3 weeks or so?
This ease my mind that I'm still in control.
Thanks
Hi, well done! when you say "in remission" what do you understand that to mean? Some take it to be an HbA1c under 48: some take it to be a "normal" blood glucose HbA1c value. In both cases with no glucose-lowering medication.
The NHS will make its decisions based on your HbA1c, and won't be that interested in any other readings. Partly, this is because of how payments to the practice are generated.
If you just want to check one-off blood glucose readings you can use a glucometer, but it might not be very informative. This is because of the very wide daily variation in BG levels depending on eg when and what you ate, stress, illness, temperatuire, time of day - there are a host of factors, largely in the gift of your liver, which is not really open to control. It's almost impossible in my experience to reliably predict an HbA1c from fingerprick readings.
I would suggest that if you want to keep tabs on what's going on, you might try testing before and two hours after meals. The before gives you a baseline. The after reading should show you how well your system is dealing with glucose digested from food. If you're returning to within two points of your starting value, and not above 8.0, that's a good indication that you're not having long periods at high(er) BG.
The other factor to bear in mind is that glucometers are by their nature up to 15% inaccurate - so a true BG value of (eg) 5.0 could be shown as anything between 4.3 and 5.7.
