February 1, 2006
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Blood Sucker
I am a diabetic. I test my blood sugar frequently. Each time I test on a finger tip, it hurts … for several days. If I test four times per day using four fingers of each hand and both sides of each finger tip, I’ll be hitting each test site once every four days.
That isn’t long enough for healing to take place.
If I puncture an alternative site, such as a forearm or the heel of the hand, not enough blood flows and there is no way to squeeze more out.
I needed something to suck out the blood from an alternative site.
I recently obtained a new meter, an Ascensia Contour, a Bayer product. Like most of the meters I’ve gotten in the last few years, it was free. The companies have finally learned that they make their profits on the test strips and giving the meters away gets a customer likely to buy their test strips. I, on the other hand, had been using the meter with the cheapest (to me) strips.
For a while, that was the ReliOn, from Walmart / Sam’s Club. Then my insurance changed policy and the cheapest was BD Logic.
Unfortunately, I recently observed that the BD meter was giving wildly erratic high readings. A quick test showed that two tests with the BD and one from the ReliOn, all from the same drop of blood, gave different readings, with both of the BD readings, which weren’t close to each other, much higher than the ReliOn.
So I changed meters and checked for about ten days that the Ascensia agreed with the ReliOn (which uses so much blood I was forced to use fingers; alternate sites would never be able to supply enough).
Included with the Ascensia was a coupon for their Vaculance, the blood-sucking device I needed. The coupon was expired, so I called the company. For a small shipping charge, they sent me the blood sucker free.
It works fine. A lancet punctures the skin and the device sucks a droplet of blood to the surface, as advertised. It is enough blood for the Ascensia or BD meters, but not for the ReliOn.
At first I didn’t have my lancets seated deeply enough. That left a couple of bruises. They are unsightly but didn’t hurt. The process is, as advertised, painless.