Good morning y’all, please remember I am not a medical professional and I don’t even play one on tv. Any of the medical crapola I ramble on about is strictly my medical crapola and shouldn’t be taken as any sort of advice. The internets are chock full of people telling other people what to do and I will not do that. I may share moments of my own stupidity, but that is to hopefully  make you laugh. Anything you learn is at your own risk! 

So, after you stick your finger to test your blood sugar…where do you wipe the blood?

Back in the days of yore when the standard recommended all diabetics wipe their fingers with an alcohol swab before testing your blood sugar it was easy–you wiped the leftover blood on the used alcohol swabbie. But, the standard changed and people realized that wiping with alcohol didn’t really help all that much and actually dried out the fingertips a wee bit too much which led to further damage later on. So, la de da…we are now to wash our hands before taking our blood sugar and if no handwashing is available THEN we use our alcohol swabbies. I’m going to assume that the current standard just wants us to get up and go wash our hands after we test our blood sugar and get rid of the blood that way….but damn, especially when our blood sugar is wonky….moving can be blegh.  Or maybe you just don’t wanna go back into the bathroom or maybe you just have a thousand other things to do – doesn’t matter…there are other wiping options available that don’t put yourself or anyone else at risk.

anyone else I say? Yep. We as diabetics have to hold ourselves to a higher standard of knowledge about blood-borne pathogens than our naive brethren “the public”.  There is a famous advice columnist who fell into the the naive brethren category and she attempted to shame diabetics back into the public bathroom to which most of us diabetics said, “uh, hell no….ew!” and quickly wrote her advice back into the stone age. In other words, inject your meds wherever you like and check your blood sugar wherever  you like. I have to add to that – make freaking sure you keep track of your sharps and your blood! Not because I am worried about you or think you are a hotbed of contagious disease, but because I’m worried about the public.

Imagine for a second you are a 16 year old waitress with a cut on your hand and when you are cleaning off your table that just left you drop the dirty napkins you gathered onto your tray and you realize one of the napkins you dropped had some blood on it. crap, you think your cut reopened. You inspect the cut and nope…not healed, but not actively bleeding. Crap, you just held someone else’s blood against a wound…..and potential panic ensues. 

So, what I am saying is…if you bleed on it, you own it and it goes with you and/or is disposed of properly. Wherever you wipe your blood is your business, just don’t make it anyone else’s problem.

So, where do I wipe my blood?  My hair. Yes, I know it’s weird. No, I never started doing it on purpose. It just seemed normal to me and it meant that I wasn’t staining my clothes or leaving my blood around willy nilly. It has worked for me pretty well now for many years. A few people I know vampire theirs, you know…just lick it off their finger. For some reason that doesn’t appeal to me personally, but it isn’t offensive to me.