letter to friend

Letter to a friend of mine. 

 I am doing ok.   What amazed the dr was that anyone with diabetes is around at 92.  If you looked around here you see walkers and wheel chairs  And a few walking ok without help. Not all are diabetic  As a doctor for places like this all he sees are people extremely handicapped by diabetes.  Overweight, any kind of infirmity, blind, amputated legs, Heart disease, pain in the feet sores on the feet  so very few last past the age of 65.  I asked him how old he thought I was and he said 60 to 65.  So when I show up at 92 it is incredible.  He sincerely could not get over it. I was pretty sure that I was a rarity so when I ask a nurse how many diabetics they know who are over 90 and they glibly say lots.  The doctor proves that to be a lie.  Why they will lie about it is beyond me. They do absolutely no diabetic education.  I think a major reason there are so many overweight diabetics is they will not exercise.  The staff here frown on you even taking your own b/g test.  But if you don't know what you b/g is there is no way to control it. They serve good food here but way too much for a sedate people.  If you  eat  a meal of a thousand calories then go vegetate between meals there is no where for the glucose to go but out the kidneys or saved as fat around your midsection therefore most are way overweight. People here   could learn something but over the years they think they know something about diabetes or trusts the doctor to know what to do that they will not look into it any more. Diabetes is a disease that you yourself MUST take charge of.  A doctor can not do it unless he would sit with you and tell you what to eat and when to eat and what insulin to take and when. . They can not and will not do it.  So they go through the motions of medicating you for diabetes and you continually get worse and worse,  Finally you die and they go on to other patients with the same song and dance.   My main problem and it began years ago before I knew anything about diabetes and before I was diagnosed diabetic is my blindness.  Once it started nothing could be done about it. 

Accuracy in B/G testing

To all you diabetics out there who take so much confidence in the readout of your meter when you test for glucose.  Did you read the fine print where it says it is accurate to 20 percent?  Well, for monitoring your B/G that is next to useless if you can't improve the accuracy.  Let's say your actual B/G is 100.  20 percent of that is down to 80 or up to 120 what your meter can say and still be in it's spec's not much good though for adjusting you B/G.  How you can increase the accuracy to 1 or 2 percent is when you sample the blood with the strip  you keep it exactly where you sampled it so the strip does not move but keeps taking in blood if it needs it. You will not be able to see this if it does need the extra blood.  This will give it the proper amount of blood to give an accurate reading.  I use a Bayer which reads out in 5 seconds and keep it in position for 4 seconds if possible. This works fine on any size drop of blood if the sample into the strip does not reduce the size of the blood sample.  If it does reduce the sample size that means it did not get full.  But if you don't see a reduction in the blood drop you will get an accurate reading because it had it's fill. This works for very small drops. The main problem then is getting the ding and drawing the strip out too soon.  I keep the strip in for several seconds although I am not sure it really needs that long  for accuracy.  Maybe even one second would be ok.  It is easier for me to just keep it in to be sure instead of sticking myself the number of times to figure it out.  Now if you happen to have a reading of 110 and want to bring it down to 90 you can check yourself 15 or 20 minutes later and be fairly sure the reading you get is correct. If you are only sure of 20 percent  it would be useless to adjust with that information.

-- --------Fishing in Alaska ---------nowaytofish.blogspot.com --------- Doyal and I put ours on even though we couldn't live more than 10 or 15 minutes in water like that. Too far to swim and the dinghy wouldn't hold us all.--------------- 4 years in 3rd Inf in WW2 billswar.blogspot.com My less heroic contribution. seniorobserver.blogspot.com KE7PLR Established (born)Aug. 23, 1921