Hand care - after 'sticking' your fingers with a lancet

Lip balm every now and then has been suggested.

Any other Suggestions?



What about folks who have been doing it for years, whats the condition of your fingers.

Any secret hand/finger treatments to pamper your fingers…





my mother just wipes with cotton after lancing her fingers (a T2 for 25 years)



admittedly everynight she applies cream to her feet to moisturise (she is scared of diabetic foot complications),

so she gets a good helping of cream on her hands and fingers as well

and her fingers are still in great condition

Been doing it since meters first came out. I just lick the blood off after testing and use hand lotion a couple times a day. No problems.

For me, a bigger challenge in the winter is finding a moisturizer for my hands that doesn’t taint blood sugar tests. Virtually all the hand lotions contain ingredients like glycerin that falsely increase readings. Right now I’ve been using johnsons baby oil gel with aloe vera. It seems to work ok and as a side benefit, I smell like a baby.

ps. And I lick the extra blood up, I really hate to waste protein.

lol, hand care after sticking my finger?
lick carry on with my day :-p

I test about 14 times a day and do nothing in the way of hand care and my fingers are fine (apart from the inevitable little black dots), I know some people get calluses and that though, so maybe I’m just lucky?

ME TOO!!! I go with you on everything.

I have a bigger problem with my fingers cracking from the cold. That is painful.

Lancets have improved so much over the years. Now it is just Place, Click, Touch and Lick. Ta Da… All Done.

I lick too! My theroy is that if I lick it, I will rid myself of another autoimmune disease like Diabetes.

I get cracking from the cold as well. Before bed I put lots of cream on my hands and cotton socks over it. My mom did this with me since I was a little girl and it makes a big difference I think!

I had never thought to try lip balm!!

I have been testing 15-20 times a day and I have callouses developing on most fingers. I just started to use my pinky fingers.

For me basic lotion is not enough to get rid of these callouses! So I would be happy to hear other suggestions as well!

Michael, the thing which I’d advise you to check is…



what’s the size of your lancet? Using a fat lancet (for example, the standard-sized One-Touch “Ultra-Soft”) is like hammering a Railroad Spike into your finger. The amount of damage, in my experience, is more closely related to lancet thickness than shooting depth. And so, I’d strongly recommend switching to one of the 33-gauge lancets, even if you have to increase the depth by an additional click to make up for the smaller diameter.


I use BD “Ultra-Fine 33” but since they’re no longer in the bG meter business, I don’t know if they still sell the lancets. There are several other brands; even J&J has finally noticed that the regular “Ultra-Soft” is terrible, and they sell a thin version too. I don’t change the lancet very often, so my box of 100 BD lancets is only about half gone after two years… a re-use habit which I don’t recommend.)



Don’t worry about insurance coverage. Just go to a retail drugstore and buy some good ones. YMMV, of course. You’re poking into the sides, a ways past the the last joint- right? NOT the tips of your fingers, frontal fingerprints, or between earlier knuckles, right? Those places have a lot more nerves.

Like other posters, I’ve been a self-consuming Vampyr for many years. Why is it such an “automatic” response to seeing a bit of blood on your finger?

Lick? Lick?!? OMG

(Faints and falls over…very gracefully…heh.)

I have never once licked. It never even occurred to me.

I wash my hands, bring the paper towel with me to where ever I’m testing (desk, usually), poke the SIDES of my fingers somewhere in the last joint (switching it up), and then as soon as I put the drop of blood on the test strip, I PRESS the clean paper towel very firmly against the testing site. I used to get very sore and bruised but now that I press and hold firmly for about ten or fifteen seconds, I stop the secondary bleeding under the skin, so no bruise and no soreness…and NO LICKING. ;0P

I don’t like to use hand cream because I’m a classical guitarist and hand cream messes with the calluses on the tips of my left hand, making my fingers more tender. Not good. You want a nice, thick callus on the tips to prevent the pain from long playing – they’re like little leather moccasins on my left fingertips.

I also worry about the cream messing with my bg readings.

But if my skin gets super dry, I’ll rub something hypoallergenic and unscented like Cetaphil cream all over my hands, arms and elbows, and then carefully wash it off of my fingers and dry them well.

If you test the sides of your fingers, you basically end up with 20 general sites to test (left and right side of ten fingers.) If you think of near the tip vs near the finger joint as two more sub-divisions, you end up with 40 sites to test. I try to switch it up so that I don’t poke the same place any more often than every 48 hours. That seems to be enough time for the sites to heal and I don’t have any skin damage.

I also use a fresh lancet each time (!!!) so the hole is very small, I’m not smashing a big hole with an (ahem) blunt lancet.

LOL! Well the way I think is blood is life sooooooooooo…LOL!Plus with a busy life my pants were dotted red. Try and explain that one! LOL!

This is so funny and shocking to me – I have never once in 8 years put my finger to my mouth after testing.

I’m trying to figure out why.

I think perhaps it’s years of working in: a dental office, two nursing homes, three daycare centers and then a hospital.

I guess its because when I see blood on my hands I’m trained to see it as something that could give me hepatitis or AIDS, not as my own bodily fluid – full of iron that I don’t want to waste.

I lick it off. Put lotion on throughout the day. No big deal. Hands are fine…fingertips, well, ugly. lol

I have never licked blood off my fingers. It may be my nursing background, as with another poster. I test 4 to 8 times a day (less than most of you) and my fingers are OK after 29 years. For the last year or so, I have used a lotion that has shea butter in it. I am looking for more concentrated shea butter for my next purchase. I like how it works for my feet and hands. Unfortunately, I guess, I don’t even wash my hands before testing, unless I know they are dirty from either eating or working outside or whatever. So all my dirty BG testing secrets are out! My fingers look OK but my hands are winter hands now.

Well, I’ve been testing for 20 years, and have done exactly nothing to care for my fingers, and they are fine! Not even very calloused. But I think everyone’s different.

Suzy Cohen, a pharmcist who has also written a book on D, talks about lipbalm in her book

this is her blogsite
http://dearpharmacist.com/

she has a video on youtube too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOrsMzwXyvY

i started licking… but mostly it was because my pants made me look like a murderer from all the blood spots



as far as the condition on my fingers… covered in dots and slightly flatter on the corners, but otherwise in good shape

lol Doris, i didn’t read your comment. It looks like we are in the same boat!

I use beeswax and it works real well.