By the Pricking of My Thumbs - National Diabetes Month

 "By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes."

    --Second Witch, Macbeth IV:1

American Hallowe'en is associated with literary wickedness, cartoon witches and ghosts, jack-o'lanterns, and schlock horror films of decades past. It's no surprise that many Hallowe'en designs draw from Shakespeare's "Scottish play", whether "Double, double, toil, and trouble" or "Something wicked this way comes".

And so I wasn't surprised to see "something wicked" on a crafting YouTuber's t-shirt.

That said, pricking our thumbs (and other fingers) to deliberately draw blood, Sleeping Beauty-style, is a necessary behavior for most people living with diabetes: the small blood drop feeds a chemically active sensor in a device that tells us our current blood glucose ("blood sugar") levels. This information tells us if we need insulin, or sugar or carbohydrates, and whether we are "safe" to drive, to work out, to sleep...

November is Diabetes Awareness Month: American Diabetes Month in the US, Canadian Diabetes Month in Canada, and so on. It is the month of Dr. Frederick Banting's - the discoverer of insulin's - birth; his birthday (November 14) is celebrated around the world as World Diabetes Day.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the second half of the Wise Sister's quote reminded me of the first, and of my many friends, colleagues, and family members living with diabetes. It took a bit of time to replace "something wicked" with a phrase that "scanned" properly (had the same number of syllables and similar stresses), and a bit longer to do the artwork. The typeface is "feather" by NJ Studio, available at Font Bundles.

Now, to choose a number.

In the "English" units used in the United States, the ideal blood glucose range to which we're asked to manage is from 80 to 180 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter), with an average non-diabetic number being roughly 100 mg/dl, which is what we tend to see in glucometer advertisements. While a spot reading in this range may not be unreasonable for those of us with what I refer to as "mild" Type 2 diabetes, it's an extremely unlikely number for a person with Type 1 diabetes or more advanced Type 2, and this "random" glucose number is a serious point of contention in our communities. 

My choice of "169" is based on a recollection of one of my Type 1 friends mentioning the 160s in her typical range for something. 

The detail of the blood drops, the lines of the thumbs, and the blood uptake on the test strip mean this design will be difficult to reproduce in vinyl, and may need to be produced as a sublimation print or an iron-on transfer. That said, I think I would replace the readout window with a piece of chalkboard iron-on vinyl so that the person wearing the shirt could add whatever number was current or more appropriate for the time the shirt was being worn.