How often do you test?

If you have Medicare, test strips are covered. If not, test strips are expensive. But the dilemma is that you should test several times each day and in (very few) conversations with other diabetics without insurance, the expenses of dealing with type 2 were just too much. They were going without test strips, but actually not renewing meds or going to see a doctor.

I can agree that finding the money can seem hard, but so is finding a way to make the car payment or the cable bill. Like everything, we find ways to pay for what we really want. Easy for me to say, I have Medicare.

Do you test before and after lunch? I am going to get more attentive to those two tests now that I have a better understanding of things. I had been wrongly thinking that waiting two hours after eating was to let the number settle down! When I'd still see a higher number I thought I was testing too soon! I was missing the point. And the fact is, the first of the two tests is supposed to be at the start of the meal, not after. Oops..

Now I realize that only one fasting number does little to help us see how we're doing for the day. Now I see that we want the after-lunch higher reading to keep it honest: the ups as well as the downs.