Accountability

After two weeks of FreeStyle Libre bliss, finger pricks feel somewhat like disorganised chaos.

Test strips can often be found scattered across my desk, because I’m too lazy to aim for my pencil cup when ejecting test strips from my AccuChek Guide. Blood stains can be found smattered on my desk, because I can never quite find a happy medium between strip fill errors and a bloodbath on my fingers. And then those bloodstains end up on my insulin pump. And my iPhone.

I don’t have the convenience of leaving the house with nothing but my iPhone and a tube of glucose tabs in my pockets. Reaching for my meter, lancet and test strips at 3am feels like hard labour compared to the relative ease of swiping my reader against my arm in the dark.

More than anything, I just don’t feel that same accountability that I do when I’m looking at my Libre reader and seeing that continuous flow of extremely photogenic data. I don’t feel as motivated to keep my blood sugars between the lines when I can’t see them.

I must admit that its been a while since I last properly utilised the Bluetooth capabilities on my blood glucose meters. I did have a valid excuse when I was the owner of a very poorly performing iPhone 6. But that’s no longer an issue since I upgraded to a (refurbished) 7 Plus a few months ago.

At the Diabetes Congress last year, I learned that the mySugr diabetes logbook app could now receive readings from AccuChek blood glucose meters. So, keen to try something new, I downloaded mySugr and connected both of my AccuChek meters.

I have to say, its helped me to rediscover the accountability that I’ve missed when I’m not using the Libre. It’s nice to open up the app and look through my numbers and averages. Those 15 or so finger pricks throughout the day get packaged up into a half decent graph. It gives me a good picture of how I’m tracking along through the day.

One thing that would make a great addition to the app would be the ability to receive data from my insulin pump, and other diabetes devices. Alas, we don’t seem to do interoperability all that well in the diabetes community. I’m also still waiting on a bolus calculator, which would be extremely helpful to MDI-ers.

Yes, mySugr can do a lot of other wonderful things, but for me it’s proven it’s worth in accountability alone. I would like to put more effort into ‘marking’ my readings, which would allow me more ‘filters’ when reviewing my data. But logging data isn’t really my thing.

Quite honestly, I don’t see myself moving beyond my current regime of intermittent FreeStyle Libre and finger pricking in the near future. So, it’s really fantastic to see more options that bring some of those tech benefits to people doing it old-school.