Too often, we look at the 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day trends on our blood glucose monitors, see numbers that look great (or horrid), and rather than seeing an A1c that confirms those readings, we get a number that would appear to have come completely out of left field. (Or Mars. Or the Andromeda Galaxy. It's hard to say exactly where.) We can either scratch our heads and wonder why the numbers aren't correlating, or we can take out our manual readings logs, our meter downloads, our CGM downloads, and our personal journals and try to figure "what we are doing wrong".

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Whether your meter uses "E", "ER", or another way of designating an error, we've all run into those days where it seems like we waste a whole vial, drum, or disc of strips (and lancets, if you use the Renew device!) just to get that magical number. By the time you get that "beep", you're certain you're reading fifty points off one way or the other, just due to the stress of getting the bloody lancet to produce a bloody large-enough blood drop that beads up on -- rather than wets -- the surrounding skin, and the bloody strip to take up enough of that blood to produce a bloody glucose reading.

(And yes, "bloody" is meant both as description and expletive.)

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