Monday, March 26, 2012

Impatient! and a mathematical thought

I still don't have a message from the endo re: A1c and calcium. Probably it's the calcium that's causing the holdup. I was kind of patient for about 48 hours and since then I've been calling calling calling the patient information network. Fortunately I can check for messages from my doctor without dealing with anything other than the robot system so I don't drive anybody nuts. I guess I could overwhelm the robot with call volume.

I called activa to order a jet injector, and got put on a waitlist. They'll call me when they've filled the orders that are already waiting. The person on the phone said that would probably be in August or September. That's a long time!

This morning I put the needle up against my skin for the breakfast injection and it hurt right away so I moved the needle over half an inch and pressed. That spot gave me some real resistance before the needle went in, but didn't really hurt. They both bled. It feels like it bled like crazy and I did check blood sugar off of it. But it was probably only a total of like 5 microliters of blood. Microliters! That's millionths of a liter, that's how we measure the blood for blood sugar testing.
I'm a pretty small adult; my body contains roughly 3 liters of blood. The test strips I use need 0.6 microliters of blood. That means a blood test requires roughly one five-millionth of my total blood.
That also means that even if I were to check my blood sugar 10 times per day for 100 years, the amount of blood used (does not count all the blood wasted in blood sugar checking attempts) would be 10 per day * 365 days per year * 100 * 0.6 microliters = 219 milliliters or roughly one fifth of a liter. That's at most a twelfth of the blood in my body right now. One blood donation that wouldn't kill me would amount to all of the blood needed for all of the blood sugar checks for my entire life.

1 comment:

Nathan said...

Jonah, I think that's a long time to wait for a product! I'm shocked. They need to step it up!