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When I first had to start testing my bloods, it was a very scary thing to do, to have to prick your finger with this, in your mind is, a huge needle but it's not, it's tiny. And you sit there with it on your finger and you think "I'll do it in a minute I'll do it in a minute" but it doesn't hurt to that extent. I test my bloods 2, maybe 3 times a day. If you are having a hypo or heading towards a hyper, then you would test a lot more often.
Fingers do tend to get a bit sore; you always tend to use the same finger pads. I always use my left hand because I am right handed and it is easier to click the needle with. It is a bit uncomfortable but it is nothing you can't live with. The actual injecting, I was very scared of. When I was at the hospital, they gave me a rubber ball to practise on. You had to practise on that the first few times. I do it into my stomach; some people do it on their legs but I find the stomach in the easiest place and, it doesn't really hurt. It's a bit of a fallacy that "Oh it's going to sting, it's going to be horrible". But you just get used to it and it is not that bad at all. This is my diabetes case. This is the actual bit that does the actual measurement. That has got the needle in it to pierce your finger, and these are the test strips. You take a test strip out, pop it in the bottom there, and it automatically prepares itself. Then you take the needle, prime it, hold it onto your finger and then you press the button, and it sends the needle through. Give it a little squeeze for the blood to come out, and put the blood onto the end of the test strip and then you just wait for it to work. That has come out at 7.8 which is a little bit high. We like to keep it at around 6, so this just means that I keep an eye on it, make sure that I don't get any higher during the day. I am still to have my lunch yet so I will need to test again after lunch. Have a nice drink of water which does help, and then if it gets too high, then I can always use a couple of clicks of insulin just to bring itself back down again. But it should even itself out, because it does go up and down during the day. If I did need to take any insulin at all, this is the pen I would use. And then you take the top off and you can see the insulin inside there. So just give it a shake inside there because it does settle, and then you take the lid off of the needle; literally screw it onto the top like that. Take the cap off and take the needle protector off, and there is the needle. And then you would prime it to the amount you want to take, which when I take it in the evening is about 50, but if I needed a top up during the day, I would probably just do about a 10 click or something like that. And then I just inject that into my stomach. To prime it, you twist it to the number of clicks that you actually want to take, so if I going to take 15, it would be to there. And then you just hold that onto the stomach and press the button.