It was just after 4:30 P.M. on a Thursday afternoon. I’d spent the last hour and a half at my work desk in my bedroom, checking email and dialing into a video conference call. I’d deliberately left my cell phone downstairs, wanting to resist the temptation to scroll idly through social media or check my blood sugar, which had been misbehaving most of the day.

At the conclusion of my virtual meeting, I lamented that my cell phone was downstairs. I wanted to know what my blood sugar was doing (especially if it was high so I could get some insulin pumping), but I didn’t want to walk that oh-so long distance down the stairs to retrieve it.

I sighed, resigning myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be able to check my blood sugar any time soon.

Then…I remembered.

I have a blood sugar meter mere feet away from me.

I could do a fingerstick check and actually know my blood sugar! I wouldn’t have to wait for my workday to end in order to check it, after all!

As I ambled over to my nightstand where my blood sugar meter is always perched, I chuckled to myself, marveling over how I could forget that this was an option readily available to me.

Of course, I had the option to not be a lazy Susan and walk downstairs to get my phone, but that’s not the point! (Plus, I was trying to give myself a much-needed break from it!)

It just struck me as funny – I used blood sugar meters for two decades of my life. And bear in mind here, I haven’t even been alive for a full three decades yet, so blood sugar meters are just something I’ve grown up with. How could I forget about them? Have I really become so reliant on the 24/7 reporting from my Dexcom that I’ve shunted aside my only other device that can tell me what my blood sugars are?

I think that this incident indicates that I have. And that scares me a bit.

When I first became a Dexcom user in my late teenage years, I was told that my CGM wasn’t a replacement for fingerstick checks. So up until 3 years ago (when the Dexcom G6 came out), I tested my blood sugar with my meter at least 3-4 times per day, sometimes even more.

But then the Dexcom G6 came out, and the exciting news that the technology was so advanced that it meant that people with diabetes wouldn’t have to do fingerstick checks. Gone were the days of making diabetes treatment decisions only with confirmatory fingersticks or calibration. This was huge, but I was so untrusting of the technology for the first year or so that I continued on with regular fingerstick checks…

…Until one day I just kinda stopped. My multiple-times-per-day checks turned into maybe once or twice a day, then once or twice a week, and now…really, just once or twice a month. And now I’m facing the reality that I don’t exactly feel that this decision suits me because I am the type of person who craves as much data as possible so I can make the best-informed diabetes choices for myself.

So forgetting about fingerstick checks may just be my remembering again to do them. Because when I did check my level and saw that 140 mg/dL flash up on the screen, I felt reassured and thankful for this data point on my blood sugar graph. It was nice to see this number alone, without the reminder of the yucky numbers I experienced earlier in the day…

And best of all…I didn’t have to go downstairs in order to get this snippet of information.