Recording and Sharing the Numbers
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
A list of blood sugar readings, on its own, is close to useless for adjusting an infant's treatment. What makes it useful is the context recorded next to it.
Record, for each entry:
- Time and the glucose reading.
- The feed — breast or formula, and roughly how much, or how long a breastfeed lasted.
- The dose given, and when.
- Anything unusual: a refused feed, vomiting, a poor night, a vaccination, a fever, unusual sleepiness.
This matters more in babies than at any other age, because so much of what moves the numbers is feeding, and feeding in infancy is irregular. A high reading after a large formula feed and a high reading after a refused feed mean opposite things, and your team cannot tell them apart from the number alone.
A notebook works perfectly well. So does a note on your phone, or a photograph of the notebook page sent ahead of an appointment. The best system is whichever one you will actually keep up at three in the morning.
Before each clinic visit, look back over the last fortnight yourself and mark anything that repeats — a low at the same time each night, a high after the same feed. Bringing that observation to the appointment is often more useful than the raw data.
Keep the logs. Over months they become the growth record of your child's treatment, and they are what a new doctor will want to see.