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I got a surprise when I visited the doctor this summer.
It was a routine physical, the kind that’s good to have even if you’re young and seem healthy and if you have insurance that covers it. (Thankfully, mine does.) At the end was a standard blood draw to look for anything that was off. I walked out with a cotton ball taped to the inside of my elbow and didn’t think about it for a few days.
But then my doctor emailed. One of the things they’d tested for—which I’d never heard of—was called hemoglobin A1C. There’s a more complicated definition of A1C, but basically, it measures how much glucose was attached to the hemoglobin in your bloodstream in the past few months, measured as the average percentage of your blood that was glucose. It measures your diabetes risk.
The doctor emailed to tell me my A1C was 5.7 percent. The ideal range is below 5.6 percent….
