I was diagnosed in June of 1982.  In those days, home blood glucose monitoring was about as common and as advanced as listening to music on the go.  In other words, think no ipod, but plenty of cassette player walkmans.  Home blood glucose monitoring was primitive and expensive. 

For the first two years of my life with diabetes, we used various forms of urine testing to track my levels and determine dosing.  First, in the form of tablets dropped into glass tubing filled with pee that heated and turned colors - then in the form of nifty sticks that turned colors after being dipped in urine based on the amount of sugar you were carrying.  Since you weren't actually testing bloodsugar, management was largely a guessing game.

I first met the Chemstrip BG in June of 1984.  At that time, the test strips weren't covered by health insurance and ran at around $50.00 per bottle for 50 strips.  My parents, in the interest of testing as often as possible without going bankrupt and without requiring an astronomical blood drop for each test, would cut the strips into fourths.  Chemstrips took more time to get a result.   You applied blood, then after a full minute wiped the blood off of the strip with a cotton ball and then waited another full minute.  In the end, what you had was a flexible white strip with two colored squares on the end, which you matched against colored squares on the chemstrip bottle.  The colors varied from very light to almost black.  Less of a guessing game than urine testing, but still not even close to spot on.  If your chemstrip turned a color that didn't exactly match the colored squares on the bottle, you would add up the numbers under the two closest colored squares it did match and divide in half for a result.  

You'd think I would have been happy to get a machine that read those colors for us.  Not so much.  The very first meters, which were about the size of a brick,  required that you use a full Chemstrip.  They were therefore expensive (since test strips were STILL not covered by insurance when we got our first meter) and they required a ridiculously large drop of blood.  The machine didn't make testing any faster either.  You put the blood on the strip, waited 60 seconds, wiped it off, put the strip in the machine, which counted down an additional 60 seconds and then gave you a reading.  At least it improved accuracy.

Through the years, testing technology has come a long way.  It's hard for me to believe I can get an accurate reading with a pinhead sized drop of blood in five seconds flat.  

What hasn't changed in almost thirty years, is that my life and its quality is so often judged by colors and numbers.  I remember being eight years old and watching my pee, in those glass tubes, turning colors.  I remember watching to see if it would be orange-y (good) or dark and angry and purple (bad).  I remember seeing my mother's face in those moments, seeing her wishing right along with me for a light colored reading.  

With bloodsugar testing, I remember as a pre-teen, hoping again for those light colors.  The ones that made my parent's  faces ease into smiles.  The ones that didn't crease their brows.  The ones that didn't make me feel yucky and tired and like I'd failed somehow at being a diabetic.  And I remember learning, at summer camp, about how to use alcohol wipes to manipulate the colors, making it appear that my bloodsugar was lower.  At camp, it meant double snacks - but at home, and in my heart, it meant appearing as if I were successful at having diabetes and being good at it.  

When Chemstrips went the way of the dinosaur and glucose testing went to small drops of blood, quick results, and no color matching - I turned my attention more fully to numbers.  Instead of wishing for beiges and light oranges, I wished for double digits or at least for low hundreds.   When I'm sick, and have to test urine ketones, I still hope beyond hope for those colors to be light, for those light colors to deliver me news that I'm not failing.  

I'd like to say I've grown out of judging myself and my success based on the colors and numbers of diabetes.  But that would be a lie.  I get frustrated when I see out of range numbers and I have hard time letting go of that frustration.  I wonder what I could have done differently.  I wonder what I'm doing to myself when I see those numbers, which parts of me are withering because I can't return consistent numbers in the low hundreds.

It is difficult to pat yourself on the back for all of the good things you are doing when you're seeing numbers that don't match those that keep you in the best of health.  I can eat well and exercise, and diabetes can still throw terrible curveball numbers that make me think "you could be doing more, clearly."  On some days, when I see numbers in the two hundreds or higher,  I'm sure I look much like my parents did back in the old days when my urine turned dark blue or the chemstrip turned blackish.  I know their furrowed brows were filled with worry, concern, and not judgment - in spite of having that knowledge,  I absolutely learned to judge myself in those moments.  

I learned, for good or bad, to live my life by colors and numbers.