Thursday, November 15, 2012

Day 15 ~ DiaFail (#NDAMphotoaday)

There were lots of examples floating around in my mind for today's photo.  In fact, just last night, there were two great examples that I didn't take a picture of.....of course!

So, in mulling over whether or not to 'make up' a photo by inserting the numbers I wanted, I remembered this little frustrating episode....

Ubergeek went in to test Bean one night shortly after midnight.  
He tested her once and got 233. Well, the CGM said something not even close to that, so he decided to test again just to make sure.  Something we do, especially at night when the stakes seem to be much higher.  
Now, her BG was supposedly 141.  That was a bit closer to the CGM's reading, but way different than the first strip's results.
So he tests Bean for the third time...and by this point Bean is not very happy with Daddy!  
Beep.....beep, beep goes the PDM and 90 shows up.  What the fructose?!?!

Frustrated with the 143 point difference in the readings, he comes back into our bedroom and asks me to go test her.

My first reading is 128.  Well, that's pretty close to the 141, and within the 20% margin of error that the strip manufacturers allow; just barely.
My second reading is 189.  Um.....yeah.  Not sure what to think.

At this point, according to five different test strips, with five different samples of blood, Bean could be anywhere in between 90 and 233.  What in the world are we supposed to do with a range like that?!?!

Well, we did nothing.  Didn't correct based on the 233.  Didn't treat a possible low based on the 90.  
We just sat tight and waited.  

And, as you can see, within the next hour and a half, Bean crashed to a lovely 39!  Thankfully it was an 'easy low' that came up quickly and stayed up for the rest of the night and landed at a lovely 112 for breakfast.

So, maybe the 90 was right?  
BUT, if I had trusted the 233 and corrected her?!?!?  I hate to even think how long it would have taken to get her back up from who knows how low she would have gone, plus having insulin still on board. YIKES!

This DIAFAIL is brought to you by stupid strips.  We NEED better accuracy.  Yeah, I know, most of them are accurate.  BUT, this night, I had no idea which one was accurate, or even 'close enough' to trust.

And that folks is not OK.


  1. Wow... That is brutal! I hate when I get weird numbers out of nowhere and always retest, but I've never seen THAT before. Brutal.

    I was telling a non- d person about the 20% accuracy thing the other day and they couldn't believe it was an acceptable margin of error.

  2. Oh wow. Talk about confusing. And frustrating.

  3. We have a back-up meter that we tested against a lab blood glucose draw so I know it's accurate. It's our accu-check aviva and whenever I get wonky results from "pinkie" I check it against the accu-check. This once helped me catch a false high - too bad I'd already dosed for it. Had to wake Ella up and force her to consume a large amount of carbs!

  4. Ughh...that is a really big difference so many times in a row! That is disturbing! I don't always trust the PDM meter. We have seen some discrepancies as well. We still have lots of strips from our accu check aviva so we use that at home most of the time, but the pdm meter at school. I do like to compare and like Krissy feel I can trust the accu-check more. But gosh, how scary to see such a big range and then a low that low!! We haven't seen 30's yet.

  5. Oh this is SO not okay!!!! And it's something that makes me cringe when people say "Oh, diabetes . . . so you just take your insulin and everything is fine, right?". Diabetes is hard enough even with the tools we need, but when our tools aren't giving us data we can trust? Forget it!!

