How to Self-Monitor Blood Glucose

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Kayti Brosnan. I'm a registered nurse here in Austin, Texas, and today, I'm going to talk to you about how you self-monitor blood glucose. So with the technology, the advances that we've had, people are actually doing this at home and they're doing it on a daily basis. This is the best way to manage your diabetes. So what you do is you have a monitor. There's a lot out on the market, but you have a monitor that will...you'll collect a droplet of blood. You want to do this usually in the morning and at night and before meals. Sometimes if you're not on insulin, you're only doing this with your fasting blood sugar, which is in the morning. But you'll put a droplet of blood into this meter and it will give you your blood glucose level at that time. And then these also have memories within them, and so you can kind of watch the progress, bring the monitor to your doctor, and they can kind of see what's going on, what is...what is causing maybe high or blood...or low blood sugars. Another thing is just being in tune with your body -- being aware of when your blood sugars are high. You might start to have extreme thirst, you might be tired and irritable. Or if you have low blood sugar, you start to feel real weak, faint, shaky, you might feel dizzy. You just know, "Okay. Hey, something is off. I'm not feeling right. I feel a little bit unwell." Go ahead and check your blood sugar and see what's going on there. That's a...those are some really good indications that your blood sugars might be off. So those are just some of the ways that you can do some self-monitoring of your blood glucose level by yourself."