This is my daily chart for monitoring my blood sugars. I have Type II Diabetes and must control the level of glucose in my blood stream by eating correctly. My chart is longer than the standard 140-day chart, but I extended my time scale to give me a complete picture of where I've been and where I'm going.

An explanation about the chart. I try to monitor myself at least two times a day. I like to get a level first thing in the morning just to know how I started the day. There are four data series on the chart: breakfast, lunch, supper, and bedtime. To avoid data overlap, I divided the lunch series by 10, the supper series by 100, and the bedtime series by 1000. Breakfast levels remain unscaled. The normal blood glucose level ranges from 70 to 120 ug/ml. (By the way, I'd like to monitor my glucose levels four times a day, but my fingers get really sore from sticking them with my Penlet, a spring-loaded lancet, used to draw blood.

The data up through the beginning of May 1999 represent my attempt to control my blood glucose levels with diet alone. You can see how difficult it was. Breakfast levels average 115 ug/m, lunch averaged 122 ug/ml, supper averaged 141 ug/ml, and bedtime averaged 124 ug/ml. My grand average was 122 ug/ml. Not very good. As you can see by the absence of data points between May and July, I got discouraged. Bad news is punishing, and I stopped subjecting myself to bad news. Bad idea!

I saw my doctor in mid July and told him how hard it was to manage my levels with dietary control alone. He prescribed a medication called, Glucotrol, which lower glucose levels. I don't recall the mechanism my which Glucotrol accomplishes this action; there are three or four groups of medications that do the same thing but by different means. As you can see, the addition of Glucotrol produced a fairly stable jump down from 115 ug/ml to 95 ug/ml (breakfast), 122 ug/ml to 103 ug/ml (lunch), 141 ug/ml to 92 ug/ml (supper), and 124 ug/ml to 107 ug/ml (bedtime). Average levels changed from 122 ug/ml to 99 ug/ml. The daily bounce is quite small for breakfast but on the same order after medication as before. Lunch, supper, and bedtime show 2-3 time the bounce with bounce being nearly equal before and after medication change.

Good news is reinforcing. I occasionally get an outlier, but these levels happen on occasions where I am eating out and I make a decision to sacrifice the long term good for the enjoyment of the moment. I just visited my doctor and showed him my chart. He was impressed and understood it immediately. He ordered a test called an "A1C" test that determines a three to four month average for blood sugars. At the time I was placed on Glucotrol, my A1C was 8.5, above acceptable limits. It is now 5.3! That's near normal.

Stuart Harder

Cambridge, MN.