My relationship has changed, and I'm not happy. Over the past three weeks, I've lost so much trust in what I'm being told that I'm looking at "playing the field" again.

The relationship I'm talking about is the one with my glucometer.

I'd been very happy with my Freestyle meters for years -- starting out with the original Therasense Freestyle, upgrading to the Freestyle Flash as soon as it came out, and -- somewhat hesitantly, and based largely on economics (namely, Abbott's Freestyle Promise program) -- upgraded to the Freestyle Lite about fourteen months ago. When a couple of Abbott reps told me about the new strips and how much more accurate they would be, I looked forward to getting them and working with them. Finally, exactly a month ago, they arrived in my regular prescription refill.

What's happened since has given me pause.

While my first control test of the old versus the new strips showed the new strips about 20 mg/dl lower than the old strips, this was well within the listed range of "good" and within the sort of batch-to-batch variations I have seen over the past several years. I love the "ZipWik^TM" tab design; it's easier to get a good reading from Freestyle's already incredibly-small blood sample. And truth be told, my first 50-strip vial did fairly well in terms of tracking my daily ups and downs in numbers close enough to my short-term historical averages to give me a good feeling. The second vial -- from the same 100-strip box -- was another matter entirely.

With my diabetes controlled by diet and exercise alone, I rarely go low enough to trigger most people's alarms. The second vial was routinely giving me readings in the 80's and below when I would have expected to have been over 100 mg/dl. To be fair, there was an occasional reading in that vial that was high enough to ward off suspicion, and I have had vials of strips that as a whole read higher or lower than others.

The third vial of strips seemed to do okay, more or less. The straw that broke the camel's back, though, was Tuesday evening getting off work. I read an 87 which I felt was much lower than I should have been, based on how I was feeling, what I had eaten, and so on. Since my fingers were a bit cold, I decided to run an alternate check on my forearm, which is generally more accurate -- except that it read an unbelieveably low 74 mg/dl! I was about to bicycle home (after dark) and since the general rule of thumb is to not exercise if you're under 100, I had the fairly large peach I had not eaten at lunch time. The general rule of thumb is that for one fruit exchange, one's blood glucose level should rise about 60 mg/dl in the first fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes later, I was still "only" at 96. I'd been thinking of resurrecting one or more of the meters I'd used in 2008 for a series of comparison tests over at TuDiabetes -- especially since my new insurance only covers OneTouch and Accu-Chek strips; now was time to put thought into practice. I went to the nearest open pharmacy (Wally World, which I generally avoid) and picked up a 50-strip vial for my Wavesense Presto and a 50-strip package for my OneTouch UltraSmart, both of which I knew I had easily available at home (most of the other monitors are in our store room).

One of the things I really hated about the OneTouch monitors was how large of a blood sample they required, and how quickly one needed to get it onto the strip. I'm pleased to say that the new "Blue" strip technology requires a much more reasonable sample size. On the other hand, I still wasted four strips of the first dozen due to that hated "Error 5" (not enough blood on strip) message. The first few readings I ran with the UltraSmart were very close to my Freestyle Lite's readings. Compare this with the Presto, which ran 10-20 mg/dl higher than either of the other two monitors. Now, on the third hand (and since I'm looking at three meters, three hands makes perfect sense!), I've found Wavesense monitors (both the Presto and its predecessor, the Keynote) normally run about that much higher than any of the "major" brands of glucometer (Abbott/Freestyle, Lifescan/OneTouch, Accu-Check), so in some ways the Presto should be a bit of a "sanity check" against both new formulations of test strip.

Would these close-enough-for-published-findings readings continue as I run through the rest of my newly-acquired consumables? Only time will tell. For now, though, I need to make sure that whatever meter and strips I use, I can trust its results. As of now, I'm once again asking my glucometers to prove that I can trust them.