Stupid Meter Tricks I

We do stupid meter tricks. Mostly for the fun of it but there is also some madness in the method, I’ll cover that madness later.

Shortly after our second case of T1 was diagnosed, on vacation at Disney, we found ourselves sitting at a restaurant table with a 7 year old who was in between thinking it was cool to be in the D club with her older brother and realizing much of the stuff she had to do, now that she was in that club, hurts.

So waiting for the waitress we amused ourselves testing everything we could get to wick into the strip and some stuff that wouldn’t. We tested Coke, Sprite, Milk, and tried for Ketchup and Gravy some where in there we tested a little blood.

So here is the madness, testing hurts. Period.

Diabetes care is a pain in the butt, sometimes literally if that is where you wear your set. In time, the fingers get calloused and so do the emotions but at first both are Very Raw

Joking around with the meter helps to de-mystify it. It isn’t some sacred relic is an every day tool. It can be part of play. It can be ordinary.

It needs to be ordinary, it needs to be theirs and it can be played with, all this because it needs to be used.

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Stupid Meter Tricks II

The Science Project

One of the days when my kids were kicked out of school, because the school was having hissy fit over D care a few years ago, I had them do some experiments on test strip coding.

We dug up strips with as far apart codes as we could find. (We use one touch ultra smart meters.)

Using control solution we tested strips at their code values.

We calculated the variance between strips.

We tool a little time to talk about this: with the same fake blood the number bounced around a little, so a few points here or there isn’t a big deal.

Next we tested with transposed values for example 7 for 20 and 20 for 7.

We calculated average results and compared to the correct code results.

We found that the average difference when miss coded was about 1 point on the meter for every code number off. So a 7 vs a 20 is about a 13 point difference.


131 vs 144 - No big.

Now a 2 vs a 40 with a result of 68 - is that 68 or 30 or 106. That is an issue.

This is a great little science experiment that you may want your kids to do when they are the right age to discover for themselves why coding matters. If they discover it, they may take it to more to heart and practice.

Part of the point was to learn something on a day when they weren’t in school. The lesson was similar to the one in Stupid Meter Tricks I. Part of the point was in part to de-mystify the meter. Part was a little more, in this case it was to get real about miss coding. It happens from time to time. Knowing how the meter works and what the expectations are for a variance in BG due to a coding error helps. There is a margin of error in everything we do, knowing when that is a significant issues and when it isn’t is an important lesson.

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Stupid Meter Tricks III

So here is a little game to play on a weekend morning. I call it how much do you go up.

OK before we go any further don't do anything stupid, start in range and try to stay in range.

Got it?

Good.


Get up and test first thing in the morning.

Eat a very know amount of carbs preferably not a lot - say 10 to 20 maybe even a few tabs.

Don’t bolus.

Test every 15 minutes for a few hours.

Plot the numbers on a graph

After a few hours or if your blood goes real high correct. Write down how much insulin you took.

Test every 15 minuets for a few hours. (By the way having a move or some cartoons on TiVo is a good plan to kill the time.)

Plot the numbers on a graph

How much did you go up?

How fast?

How many BG points per carb?

How much did you come down?

How fast?

How many BG points per unit of insulin?


How was the movie or cartoons?


All these things are part of our lives. Insulin sensitivity, correction factors, cartoons & movies. What important? All this stuff varies. Sometimes the cartoons are great sometimes sometime they aren’t. If the cartoons are no good you can change the channel. If you BG is no good you can change it too.

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