So, I told you yesterday how I had been worried for the past 6 weeks or so. My blood sugar was suddenly high and I did not know why. The blood sugar readings I was getting were consistently in the 150s even after days of fasting. It shocked me and scared me. I was worried that my diabetes was back.

Even though I had left diabetes behind in March of this year, I still liked to take blood sugar readings so that I could monitor what was going on, especially while doing Extended Fasts (EF). When I started seeing 150+ readings, I was glad that I continued monitoring my blood sugar levels.

About 7 or 8 months ago, I was almost out of test strips for my blood glucose monitor. Test strips are very expensive here in the Philippines. So, I had my son, who was in the States at the time, order me some test strips on Amazon (about 1/3 the cost of buying locally), and ship them to me. I had him send them by Express Mail, I think 2 days delivery if I remember correctly. Anyway, I had ordered a lot of strips, 500 strips in all, as I recall. When packaged in the little bottles they are quite bulky, so I told my son to take all of the strips out of the bottles and put them into a ziplock bag when sending because otherwise, the shipping costs would be very high.

When I received the strips they were fine, and I have been using them ever since.

As I told you in yesterday’s article, starting around the beginning of August I was seeing blood sugar readings of 150 or more! I never got a reading less than 150, and it really upset me. I did not understand it.

About a week ago, while the readings continued to be in the 150s, I started having other problems when taking a reading. About 50% of the time, when I would do a test my meter would come up with an error message: E11. I did not think much of it, these errors happen from time to time, but the frequency was getting much worse!

Yesterday, I got the error message more than a dozen times with my meter! Finally, I got a reading: 155. I was still very upset, but I wondered why I was getting all of these errors, so I did a search on the Internet. I found on the Bayer website (my meter is manufactured by Bayer) that E11 means that the test strip is not good, and one listed cause is that the strips were not stored in the original bottle that they cam in!  Wow! I did not know that the storage bottle mattered, and I had my son throw the bottles away when he shipped the strips to me.

Luckily, I had some extra bottles of strips that had been properly stored, so I used those to do a second reading. No more E11 messages when I changed strips.

My reading, just 5 minutes after the 155 reading was 66!  Wow, I felt ecstatic! No diabetes! I was still experiencing normal levels of blood sugar!

So, I have learned something new. Those test strips always need to be stored in the bottle that they come in! You can bet I won’t be making that mistake again!

You can also bet that it was a real relief when I saw that 66 on my meter! It helped motivate me to keep on going with what I am doing!

Read Part 1

Read part 1 of this article here.