I would like you to meet my new best friend. I like to call him Spike. Yep, yep, yep. He is my personal glucometer. This part is the lancing device I press against the side of my finger tip (it hurts less than the actual finger tip, or so they tell me), push the teardrop-shaped (or perhaps it is a blood drop?) button which results in a tiny prick of the finger.

This is the monitor. Once I prick my finger I squeeze just a little bit to get enough blood to apply to the test strip (not shown). The test strip goes into the yellow “docking” area and my blood glucose results are displayed in seconds. My particular monitor keeps track of all my tests, with date and time stamp (although I haven’t figured out how to actually set those yet), calculates averages and with the right software can create all sorts of fancy graphs and charts. Now who wouldn’t love a friend who can do all that??


Best of all, everything I need fits into a tiny little travel case so I can literally carry my friend Spike around with me in my purse all day. Cute, huh?