While I was in Riga I lost my blood glucose meter which was annoying because it was not that old.  I bought it from Diabetes Australia and it cost at least $100 from memory plus all the test strips. It came in a nice little black carry case that made it very convenient to take pretty much anywhere. Mostly it would blend into the junk surrounding my laptop and become invisible so that I only irregularly took my glucose readings.

It was some time since I had tested myself and so while here in Fuquay Varina, North Carolina, I figured I better look into replacing the meter.  We went down to one of the two Wal Marts that service this small town.  They both run 24/7 and are about as big as two Bunnings put together.  On a side note it’s worth checking out the people of Wal Mart

If you are not familiar with Wal Mart they are gigantic and sell pretty much everything and at low low prices.

They of course had a huge range of meters and I could not believe that I found one exactly the same as the one I lost except for a different brand name on it.  It cost $9!

So I went home and test myself. Pricked my finger, got a drop of blood and put it on the test strip and waited the 5 seconds. Up came the result! I totally freaked out at how high the level was.  I was thinking my blood must be like syrup.

This was really bad, I didn’t want to start losing limbs so instantly I went into panic mode and prescribed myself a new dose of my medication.  Clearly I had not been taking enough or for some reason it just wasn’t working as well anymore.  Best to quadruple the daily dosage. Brilliant thinking!

For the last 3 days I’ve been taking four times the normal dose of Diabex trying to get the level down to what would be considered normal.

In addition I’ve not been eating in an attempt to also bring it down.  I’ve only had a few meal replacement shakes and water.

Yesterday I was feeling really sick and threw up, which was not nice as my stomach was empty.  I did feel a lot better and had a pasta meal for dinner.

When I tested myself first thing this morning it read 15.6 which is not good.  This had me really concerned so I thought I should read the manual which came with the meter.  I noticed that on the cover of the manual it had a picture of the meter showing a reading of 10.5  I thought, that’s not a very good reading either.  It should be around 4 to 8 After I read the manual and found no further clue I searched on Google.  I went to the American Diabetes Association site and it was talking about readings above 300! What the heck! Had I gone into one of those parallel universes…again?

Slowly it dawned on me.

Maybe, just maybe the US uses a different scale to Australia and no doubt the rest of the world.

I did some more quick googling and sure enough that was the case.

So rather than reading 15.6 the meter was really reading 156  The US uses a scale of mg/dl (milligrams/deciliter) the rest of the world uses a scale of mmol/l ( millimoles/litre)

I found a site that does the conversion.  My blood sugar level is fine and I can stop freaking out and over dosing on the meds.

Thought I was gonna die there for a minute..