For months now I have been waiting to do this. I had only to get my veins into a lab and have my A1C taken so my experiment could be put into motion. I had my end of the supplies ordered up and the rest was up to the dueling laboratories of, BIOSAFE and my local medical facility.
Earlier in the year when I was on doctoral hiatus, I bought and mailed in a home A1C test that could be mailed across country, to a Chicagoan lab, to have my number determined. I was pleased with the service, for the most part, but a voice in the back of my mind was taunting me. How could I be sure these results were accurate? After all, a blood soaked card that has endured postal handlers, cold and heat changes, and a cross country flight could hardly compete with a vial of fresh blood being tested on site. Right?
That answer would soon appear in my home mailbox. Here's how it went down.
At the end of my recent doctors visit, the "lab chick" took a vial of intravenous blood, slapped on a Band-Aid and some colorful tape and promised results in a few days. Within two hours I had gone home and completed the BIOSAFE A1C package to be mailed away. I followed the directions to a "T". Three heavy drops of blood were diffused onto a testing card and it was packed up tight with the included desiccant, helping to dry things out. A week later, and two days apart the separate lab result envelopes made their way through the mail.
The local lab results were first, complete with the whole gamut of tests and suggested ranges. The solid 5.7% stood tall on the page, with compliments from the doc scribbled nearby. The BIOSAFE letter came the two days later and didn't even make it through the front door before being ripped open. The only statistic reported was a bolded A1C of 5.4%. Even better and nearly the same results.
In a category where tenths of a percentage are looked at, these results were not ideally matching. Nevertheless, they were very close and offer little difference in how they are evaluated.
I could rely on mail-in A1C tests in the future for a feeling of where I was standing on the diabetes home-front. Compared to a local blood test, and it's near immediate timeframe from sampling to testing, the mail-in stands up to the test. Being so close, geographically, to local lab testing will understandably send me their way for future tests but it's nice to know another option is always available.
