My Story, Part Twenty Nine
I’m not a slave to numbers, even if I look at them regularly. When I found out I was diabetic, however, I had to learn what a lot of numbers meant–things like a fasting glucose, a random glucose, hemoglobin a1c, cholesterol, blood pressure.
For a diabetic, the numbers that probably mean the most–because they’re monitored every day, often several times a day–are the glucose readings they get as they test their blood sugar every morning (and after meals and before bed and many times in other situations).
WebMD lists fasting blood glucose (like right when you wake up in the morning) as 70-99 milligrams per decileter–just say 70-99. Postprandial (think “two hours after a meal”) is between 70 and 145, and random (meaning whenever else) is 70-125. If your number is below 70 you are hypoglycemic (low)–you may feel disoriented or weak. On the other hand, if your number is above 145, you are hyperglycemic (high)–and, interestingly, you may feel fine. They have a very handy chart here, about halfway down the page.
Most diabetics are high a lot of the time, including me. I remember having a fasting sugar between 70 and 99 exactly zero times. If I take a random sugar and I’m feeling a bit weak or disoriented or just have the feeling that I’m hypoglycemic–which I find difficult to explain–I can take a sugar and find myself at something like 120, which is perfectly normal by the numbers.
However, since I’m diabetic and I run a little high, a normal number might mean I feel hypoglycemic. If you expand on that, often diabetics feel fine–which means not weak or disoriented–when they run high. This means that treatment to lower people’s blood sugars often results in them feeling worse–and that feeling may lead them to stop the treatment altogether.
Now that I’ve revealed that odd bit of diabetic information and how it affects some diabetics in terms of treatment, I’ll conclude this bit of my story by saying that I really do try to keep my sugars down, but I’m not always successful. How I try, my successes, and my failures, are going to be the subject of many more of these posts to come.
July 4th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
My wife is a Type II – she was borderline until last year. She has to do the finger stick and watch her diet and exercise regimen. She’s pretty good about it. I gotta watch myself too. Keep up the good work Ryan, you’re an inspiration. I’m going to turn my wife on to your blog.