My mate is isolating and has trouble with his sugars going all over the place. He is sleeping too much etc.
I don't know anything about the condition so please bear with me.
He tells me that he is unable to get his blood sugar checked at a doctors, I presume the risk of infection, doctor being a definate thing to avoid, is too great.
Can he take the blood and I carry it to the doctors, via not going anywhere near him, drop the sample off at the end of the garden and I pick it up etc?
Will that work? Or do any good?
It is very easy to check blood sugar. Go to your local drugstore and get a glucose meter, they are cheap. I have a Walgreens True Metrix Air, it is nice because you can link it via bluetooth to a program on your phone that will track from reading to reading (but the Walgreens app is terrible, I use a free app called Glooko." You buy a meter kit, it will have lancets for drawing blood, a trigger device that you put the lancet into and press against a finger (if you hit the right spot, you won't even feel it). You put a test strip into the meter, and just have the meter touch the blood drop on your finger, in a few seconds, you will have a reading. Do a reading 2 hours after breakfast, and at different times during the day. Your blood sugar actually goes up when you sleep, and, oddly, when you don't eat.
I am type 2, my diabetes is very minor, but, I found that my blood sugar goes up in the summer because I don't hydrate enough (and it has been over 110 degrees here a few times already.)
As for food, stay away from empty carbohydrates. Eat low carb food with high fiber, rule of thumb is, if something is say 30 grams of carb, and has 5 grams of fiber, you subtract the fiber from the carbs. Also check the sugars in the meal.
Eat more veggies, eat meat, eat cheese, eat eggs. Stay away from bread, pasta, high glycemic fruit like pineapple (I love pinapple!). If you want bread, switch to a high fiber wheat or whole grain bread, you can also get very low carb tortillas that good.
There are some very tasty chocolate protein bars that are for diabetics, you get the sugar you crave, but it goes into the bloodstream slowly. Nuts are good as well, almonds and pistachios especially.
But, testing your blood is cheap and easy. In fact, most insurance programs will offer a co-pay for the strips and the lancet.
Go out and buy him a metering kit and start tracking his numbers, it is very important to get the numbers down. A doctor can do a 3 month blood sugar test called an A1C test, this will give the doctor a good idea of what the blood sugar average is.
Insulin is cheap, usually it is just a pill that you take once a day, there is also an injectable that is good for a week. For more serious Type 1 diabetes, you may need to inject yourself several times a day, my nephew is this way, it is not fun...
