It occurred to me that I'm throwing a lot of terms around that a new diabetic or someone who is non-diabetic might not know. Here's a list of some of the most common. Please let me know if you'd like me to include others.
Basal insulin: The programed schedule of background insulin you need to function in a day, excluding meals.
Blood sugar or blood glucose: This is how much sugar is in your bloodstream at a particular time. It's the reading that you get from a glucometer. One hundred is roughly considered normal.
Bolus: The amount of insulin you take with a meal to cover the carbohydrate grams you're about to eat.
Carbs: An abbreviation of carbohydrate grams. This refers to how many grams of carbs you're eating at a particular meal. Diabetics use this number divided by their insulin to carb ratio to figure out how much insulin to take with each meal.
Endocrinologist: A diabetes doctor. More specifically, a doctor specializing in hormones and glands, of which insulin and the pancreas are a very important subset.
Glucometer: Also known as a finger pricker, this is the small machine used to determine your blood glucose level using a drop of blood from your finger and a test strip.
Hemoglobin A1c: Also called HbA1c. This test measures how well you've controlled your blood sugars over the last three months by looking at the surface of your red blood cells to see what percentage of them have been chemically changed by high blood sugar. 7.0 (7 percent of those red blood cells) is ideal for a diabetic, but tighter control is always better. A non-diabetic HbA1c is between 4.0 and 6.0.
Insulin to Carb Ratio: This is the number you use to determine how much insulin to take with each meal. For lunch I'm going to have about 60 grams of carbs in leftover Chinese food. I'll take that 60, divide by my insulin to carb ratio of 4, to get a bolus number of 15 units of insulin.
Pump: A beeper-looking device that automatically gives you insulin through a small catheter you insert about every three days. Pumps provide a daily schedule of background insulin, the basal rate, and let you program in the carbs you're taking with a meal to give you boluses for meals. This is an alternative to taking multiple daily injections of insulin.
Sensitivity or correction factor: The amount of insulin you need to take to get high blood sugars back into to normal range. For me that's about 1 unit to 15 blood sugar points above 100.
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