6 Tips for healing bruised fingers

Frequent blood glucose (BG) testing is critical to good diabetes management, but sometimes it can leave your fingers bruised and sore. Good fingerstick technique helps provide more accurate readings, reducing the number of times you have to redo that BG check. Here are 6 tips to help minimise sore black-and-blue fingers.

1. Change Your Lancet Often

Although many people may reuse their lancets, they are likely to become blunt over time, causing more pain with prolonged use. Be sure to change lancets with each fingerstick to ensure they’re sharp and clean. Carry extra lancets with you and use the lowest setting on the device that will obtain an adequate amount of blood. The more shallow the poke, the less it will hurt. It may take some experimentation to see which setting works best for you.

2. Wash your hands before testing

Using alcohol, such as hand sanitizer or baby wipes, to clean your hands before testing can dry and toughen the skin over time, making it more difficult and painful to obtain a drop of blood, it can also mix with your blood and cause an inaccurate reading.

By washing your hands with warm soapy water to help bring blood to the surface of your fingers, reduce the risk of the lancet pushing any dirt under your skin, and it will remove any food residue from your last meal or snack. Even if a small amount of food or liquid is left on your fingers, it can dissolve into the blood drop and artificially raise your BG reading. Have you ever checked your BG after eating fruit and had an inaccurate reading? This could be why.

3. Choose a Less painful site

Choose the sides or tip (not the pad or near the nail bed) of your finger to take a BG. The sides of your fingers have fewer nerves and the skin is less thick than the pad of your fingertips, so it hurts less when they are pricked. The sides of your fingers also have more blood vessels closer to the surface, so you don’t have to prick as deeply to get the amount of blood required to take a BG reading.

4. Prepare Your Site

To bring more blood flow to your fingertips, after washing your hands with warm soapy water, rub the spot on the finger you are going to prick until it becomes warm while letting your arm dangle at the side of your body for about a minute. This helps the blood collect in your fingertips. If you’re having trouble getting enough blood, don’t squeeze or milk your fingertip. This can cause more pain, and may cause an incorrect BG reading. Instead, hang your hand below your waist for 10 seconds. This technique can be very helpful for people who have checked their BG for a long time.

5. Rotate Sites

Similar to rotating your infusion and sensor sites, it’s also important to rotate your lancing sites to allow your fingers to heal. Rotate the site around all the available sides of all your fingers.

6. Stop the Blood Flow

After pricking your finger, apply pressure to the site using a tissue. If you start doing other things without stopping the bleeding, dirt could enter into the small hole and potentially cause an infection. If the bleeding continues, use a plaster to help stop the bleeding and protect the puncture from infection.

Find out more about CONTOUR® PLUS LINK 2.4 blood glucose meter from Bayer

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