I imagine this chart looks very familiar to many of you:
It's been on the desks and walls of every endocrinology office we've ever been to. In some it was so prevalent, it was close to being a very strange form of wallpaper. It's no exaggeration to say that hours of my life have been spent looking at this chart.
The longer I look at it, the more questions and critical thoughts it raises. If it's supposed to be a thermometer, what's with the giant bulb at the bottom? If it were three dimensional, surely it would tip over. And really, if an A1C was below 4, how would it possibly qualify to be in that big orange area? One would be quite sick, no? Meanwhile, our hopes of hitting any area of the orange zone are pretty much nil. In fact, for small children with Type 1 Diabetes, results below 6 are cause for concern. Can't they make a slightly more encouraging chart for a type 1 diabetes setting with the zones between 6 and 8 being other shades of orange to somehow validate our hard work?
Our visit to the endocrinologist next week will include consulting this chart to compare my daughter's HbA1C results with the familiar numbers we see on the glucometer.
Perhaps we should smuggle in an "apricot" colored crayon to validate our results.
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