100,000 drops of blood

I’ve got a strange feeling that I’ve been here before.

Yesterday on Diabetes Daily, Ginger Vieira calculated how many finger-pricks she had subjected herself to.  Her estimate: 27,375.

Naturally, I did the same estimate for myself.  Of course, the math is far from perfect, as I started out without hardly any blood tests at all in the first year following diagnosis, and now I’m generally averaging 12 or so per day, but since we’re estimating, I believe what you are about to read is perfectly valid.

In my life, it’s been (approximately):

• 31 years since my diagnosis
• 10 blood sugar tests per day

Mathematically, that works out to:
31 years x 365 days/year x 10 tests/day = 113,150 tests.

Over one hundred thousand.

Let’s take a moment to see what that means.  In my life with diabetes, to-date, there have been:

My poor, punctured paws

• one hundred thousand tiny holes on my fingertips
• one hundred thousand test strips
• $100,000 spent (using an estimate of $1 per strip)
• one hundred lancets (approximately)
• 1.7 gallons of blood applied to little pieces of plastic (according to this site, 100,000 drops is equal to about 1.7 gallons)

I plan on living for another 31 years, at least.

The numbers are staggering.

We need a cure.