(300) The timely acquisition of Monarch blood testing strips... whilst things conk out

Like a lot of people I have a To Do list. I try to prioritise it by having those items I deem most important at the front. 

Only sometimes the unexpected happens.

Now read on...

On the morning of September 3rd 2024 I thought about dropping in, just round the corner, to my local health centre to get some strips that I had to use on a daily basis to monitor the level of sugar in my blood. I had two different machines and each used a different type of strip. The strips for the machine I was then using came in a yellow packet marked Freestyle with the image of a Monarch butterfly on it. But, since I had just enough such strips to suffice for a week or so, I didn't bother and instead walked off to the bank to transfer some Euros which my son had, out of the blue, requested the previous day. Indeed, as I was about to leave the house, my wife rang to see if I'd done so yet.

That afternoon my mobile phone conked out and so I drove to the local Movistar office to get it sorted. I parked my car on a scrap of land not too far from there. Movistar couldn't get it to work neither and recommended I went to a nearby technical outfit where they were to tell me it was a problem with my charger. And so I purchased a new one.

Having sorted that problem, I walked back and was very surprised to see, near to my car on the waste ground, several sundry, small groups of strips which I had certainly not noticed when I was there only an hour or so earlier. They were markedly similar to the groups of blood testing strips I had considered requesting from the health centre that morning and it occurred to me that these could be just such strips and might even work in my very machine. 

So I gathered them up.

When I got home I found that they were indeed Freestyle strips for the testing of levels of sugar in the blood of a diabetic. The expiry date on all was the end of July 2024 - i.e. they had been supposedly defunct for thirty-four days. Nevertheless, I was to discover they did work in my machine and continued to do so until September 11th 2024. 

Astute readers will have figured out that the few remaining ones I already had were more than THREE MONTHS PAST their own (supposed!) expiry dates when I chanced upon the others on the muddy ground.

...   ...   ...

One of my son´s friends, David Zaragoza, was helping us out by performing certain necessary tasks as we organised our home. He had, unfortunately, in the week before all of this, been "treated" to the unwelcome spectacle of my blood sugar dipping so far beneath its correct level that I experienced an attack of hypoglaecemia, lost control of myself completely and thrashed on the kitchen floor whilst my wife administered sufficient food to restore my functionality. And sanity.