Tim the Criminal

Tim the criminal

Writing this blog has turned me to crime.

Before you start getting all excited and voyeuristic (I know what you lot are like), I haven’t started mugging old ladies, breaking into houses to steal people’s plasma televisions or organising cross-border people-trafficking. More’s the pity.

No, for you, beloved readers, I’ve been pretending to all our favourite pharmaceutical conglomerates that I’m interested in their products and have been asking for free samples of their lovely blood glucose meters so I can use them, test them and review them for your edification. So I’ve been obtaining property by deception, a pretty rotten crime you have to admit. At least I’m not selling the damned things on eBay I suppose.

Anyway, I now have enough meters in the house to put an obsessive-compulsive glucose-measuring-fanatic to shame and the reviews will be coming thick and fast as soon as I can find a way of making blood glucose meter reviews at least faintly amusing.

I’m bringing this all up because in the interests of fair reviewing, science and the common-good I’m going to rank each meter in a number of categories, comparing thrilling things such as the whether the test strips need to be calibrated and the blood sample size; for example:

Test strip calibration > no
Sample size > 0.3ul
Test time > 4 seconds
Memory > 400 readings

So far, so worthy and dull. Diabetes UK already do a similar thing which is surprisingly useful; but the discerning diabetic needs more, damn it! We all know there’s more to a meter than sample sizes. So I’m going to rank on a number of other criteria too, namely:

Sexiness > one of the very few plus-points of diabetes are the gadgets. I feel slightly less bad that my pancreas has failed miserably when I can pull out a funky-cool meter in the pub, to gasps of admiration from my peers and loved ones. So I will rank meters on how damned cool they look. Preliminary tests have shown the Roche Accu-Chek Aviva Nano is sexier than Uma Thurman in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (stick it into YouTube, Uma-fans) while the Menarini GlucoMen LX looks like a dog has just sicked it up.

Hypo-irritation factor > glucose meters are inevitably needed at three in the morning, in pitch-darkness while your blood glucose hovers around zero and you have the mental capabilities of a backward Alabama woodsman. How a meter copes with this is vital, otherwise it’ll end up chucked against a wall in a hypoglycaemic rage.

Anyway, you get the idea – let me know what you, as dedicated diabetics, think meters should be ranked on and your wish will be my command. Unless your idea is silly. Or difficult. Or expensive. Sigh, I tell you, it’s enough to drive someone to crime!