Is it just me, or does anyone else anxiously await checking lab results after getting blood work done? And am I the only one who excitedly reads through results, looking for anything abnormal so I can see which area of my health I need to work on? It’s kind of like whenever I handed in a paper or took an exam in college – I always logged onto the student portal multiple times in the days after to check for posted grades. I do the exact same thing with my patient portal.

I know, I know, I’m weird. I prefer to call it quirky.

I started thinking about this little idiosyncrasy a few days ago, after I got lab results back from my allergist. She had me go into a lab to get 10 vials of blood drawn so it could be tested to see what types of allergies I had. Fun!!! In the days following, I checked my patient portal dozens of times to see whether the results were up. And when they finally were, I was obsessed with poring through them and seeing how much sense I could make of them.

And I’ll admit, I love looking at lab results because I have a historical view of just about anything and everything I’ve been tested for in my life, and that includes my A1c levels. On more than one occasion, I’ve fallen down the black hole of comparing and contrasting my results over the years. It’s interesting to see how I can trace back certain A1c levels to different events going on in my life at the time it was checked, and more than anything, I enjoy seeing how much I’ve improved in the last decade.

So if this habit of mine sounds plain strange to you, then I don’t want to be normal…I want to be informed. I always want to be informed when it comes to my own health, because ultimately, I’m the one responsible for it, as well as the one who will do everything in her power to improve it.