“I’m going to lunch now if you want to join me,” A said as she walked passed my cube.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” I said. Fridays during the summer are “early release” here and we were going to happy hour when we got off, so eating lunch early was in my plan for today.
Although I typically don’t eat cereal because I haven’t figured out how to correctly bolus for it, it was the only thing that sounded good this morning. Which I of course paid for with a 323 mg/dL post prandial, which was roughly an hourish before A and I headed off to lunch. (Looking back, it must have been more like 90 minutes or so.)
As I whipped out my meter to test before we walked to the café in the other building, A was already standing at the entrance to my cube. I almost told her to go ahead without me and that I’d be just a minute, but she’s a close friend and I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was ashamed of anything. I also knew she could take whatever she saw.
I was very aware that she was watching me as I squeezed my pointer finger and applied blood to the strip. While she and I had casually discussed diabetes and insulin pumps in the past, this was the first time she watched me test my blood sugar. As I tossed the used strip (138 mg/dL!) and the alcohol swab in the trash, A began asking questions:
“Do you always use your finger tip? Do you build up a callous?”
“Oh yeah, I have calluses,” I said. I showed her my favored fingers and the pore-like marks that dotted them.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “Wow.”
“Well, that’s really nothing. If you want to see ‘wow’ I’ll show you the infusion set scars on my belly,” I joked as we began walking.
"Ah, no. I'm actually a little squeemish about that kind of thing," she said.
And that was it. No more diabetes/blood sugar talk. That's all she needed at that moment. And I was fine with it.





