I didn't have a good relationship with my father when he was alive. But he was sure to impart a couple of gifts to me before he passed: the warm fuzzies that come with having a dad who thinks your birth was a terrible mistake and heart disease. Imagine my surprise when, almost two decades later, I found that he had willed another gift to me as I neared my 50th birthday. I would never have assumed he'd have enough forethought to pass along the genetics that led to me being told that I've got the diabeetus—such a treat.
Honestly, it's so bad: My diet has changed very little. My sugars are now under control, and there are worse things than having to stab yourself in the love handle daily with a wee needle. But I do have some anxiety around this exciting new opportunity to eat way fewer potatoes. I'm already on eight different medications every day. Some to keep my ticker going. Others to keep the crazy that comes with my PTSD at bay. While healthcare is free in Canada, medications are not. I'm already paying $200 each month for the privilege of popping pills. Adding the stuff I need to keep my blood sugars at bay (and also, not go blind, lose a foot, or turn my kidneys to goo) into the mix has doubled that cost. It feels a little bit spooky as I'm on my own.
And then, there's my memory. Head trauma and my mental health have turned me into a fucking goldfish. Anywhere you look, there are sticky notes in my home. Obsessive attention to my calendar and apps like OmniFocus are my only hope for staying on top of my life. I've forgotten to call the people I love the most, to bathe, and to take medications. It's a constant nightmare. I didn't get upset over my diagnosis. But the thought of having to remember to test my blood sugar multiple times a day and how to figure out insulin dosages made me cry.
I stay on top of a lot of nerd stuff: computers, phones, tablets. It's my job. But health tech has never been in my wheelhouse. I don't subscribe to streaming services with ads, and I don't have cable. I seldom see ads for medications and similar products. So, I'd like to think you can imagine my relief when I was told that I could wear a sensor on my body that constantly measures my sugar levels while sampling from my sweet, sweet blood.
Seriously, it's way too sweet.
Continuous Blood Glucose Monitors (CBG) have been around since the late 90s. Battery tech sucked back in the day, as anyone with a turn-of-the-century laptop will tell you. So a CBG would only last for a couple of days before it ran out of juice and needed to be replaced. The one I've got stuck to the back of my arm, a Freestyle Libre 2, can go for 14 days before I have to crack open a new one. It's just as well, as the things aren't cheap. Without a drug plan, you're looking at over $200 a month for the things. But holy shit, what a relief it is not to have to worry about having to check my sugars using the traditional finger-prick method.
I check in with the app multiple times each day to see where I stand. I've eaten something, my numbers go up. I get ready to sleep, and the numbers go down. If my Blood sugar drifts too low, I get an alarm well before I'm in danger of hypoglycaemia. And, because I still have little clue of what I'm doing where management is concerned, this is the one time that I'm cool with being surveilled. My data can be accessed at any time by the nurse practitioner who's helping me navigate my new condition. To me, it's magic like something you'd find in The Hammer of Arthur Gauntlet.
I'm not trying to sell anything here. If you've got what I've got, you know what you need to do to stay healthy. But in the 20 years that I've been typing about technology, I've never run across a piece of hardware that I can honestly say has changed my life. I had to share.
