Nicole wrote an entry about blood sugar logging that struck a real chord with me.

I remember using old-school blood sugar meters that took a few minutes to provide a result and didn't have a memory, so my mother would diligently write the result down in my tattered, bloodstained logbook. For the first few months - maybe years - my logbook was a steady record of how my numbers were faring.

Then we became used to diabetes, as a family. Bottles of insulin next to the milk in the fridge became commonplace, and testing sugars throughout the day was just part of the routine. Meters were blessed with the ability to retain results - hundreds of them! - so our logbook notebook often collected dust.

The logbook sort of fell by the wayside.

That is, until my appointments at Joslin.

I was seeing my pediatric endocrinologist at the Joslin Clinic in Boston at least four times a year. Which mean that, at least four times a year, my mother and I were sitting in the Joslin waiting room, logging my numbers into a notebook, occassionally switching pens and bending the page corners to make it look like we had been keeping a real-time record all along.

Keeping track of my numbers has always been a huge challenge for me. I test my blood sugar very regularly and I take full responsibility for my diabetes, but plotting numbers is a huge hurdle. Yes, I understand the value of these logbooks. Of course I know that isolating blood sugar trends is the first step in stablizing them.

Thank goodness for that little cord that links from my meter to my computer. That thing is my saving grace. Link up my machines once a month, download results, plot them into the jazzy little graphs, and all of a sudden my numnbers materialize and make sense to me.

Fixing the problems with those numbers? Well that's a whole other post. ;)