Friday Five: Meter Reader
A collection of random thoughts on glucose meters. Enjoy.
1. I’ve called myself a meter hoarder, but I know there are others with a larger collection than me. I have five meters.
2. I get really annoyed when people call blood glucose meters “diabetic meters.” It doesn’t have diabetes, monitor diabetes or require you to have diabetes in order to use it. I’ve stabbed poked and tested many a non-diabetic with them (at their request of course, I don’t go around randomly checking BGs.
3. I do get confused when people call them “glucometers.” It looks right spelled out, but sounds foreign to me when spoken. When I got my wisdom teeth extracted, the nurse asked if I’d brought my “glucometer” with me or if we should test on the office’s. It took me a solid 10 seconds to realize what she was talking about.
4. I love it when people ask me about meters. My brother called to wish me a happy birthday last week and in the middle of our conversation asked, “What’s a USB meter? What does the USB do?”
5. Why is it that high readings take longer to come up? My meter is super speedy when I’m low or in a good range, but it takes forever to process when I’m 170+. Or maybe it’s just me?
I agree with you on #3. To me, Glucometer is and always will be a brand name of a meter that was manufactured by Ames and later sold to Bayer (who renamed it “Ascensia”.
Regarding #5, I haven’t noticed that with modern meters. With the old Chemstrips, circa-1980s, you were supposed to wait two minutes before comparing the color on the strip to the chart on the side of the vial. But if you were over 240, you were supposed to wait an additional minute before reading it. The meter (which had some optical component that analyzed the color) gave a result in two minutes, regardless. I wonder if your meter also has some sort of chemical reaction, and for higher BG’s, it needs time to make sure all of the glucose in the sample has reacted… or something like that.
I have plenty more meters than you do. Every opportunity to pick up a free meter, I take it (though I’ve exercised some restraint as of late). It’s like an addiction, though I never use the stuff I crave.
I’m a such a d-greenie that I never knew Glucometer was a brand name at one point and I don’t really know how chem strips work. I usually test on the OmniPod PDM which is a Freestyle lite, but my spare Freestyle doesn’t take as long when I’m high.
I suspect that my meter collection will grow the longer I have diabetes!
My relatively new Verio IQ makes 5 meters in my possession. I only have strips for the Verio and the Ultramini’s. I think it’s nice to have a back up but I seem to collect them too.
Haha! Totally with you on the glucometer thing! It’d be easier to catch if they pronounced it like “gluco-meter,” but noooo, it’s all “glooook-Ommmmmm-eater.”
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