I remember someone once telling me, "I don't participate in trials for new medicines because you never know…but devices – that's another story!" So, here's my story.

I'm testing a new digital, battery-operated lancing device, the Pelikan Sun, that I first saw at a recent Children with Diabetes conference. It’s already on the market in Australia and is coming to market here in the fall. It might not be for sale yet, but I’m already sold on it.

The Sun holds a cartridge of fifty lancets, so you always get a fresh one and never prick your finger accidentally. I ordinarily change my lancets with the coming of each new moon, so having them change automatically in the machine both combats my laziness and really does minimize pain. Less pain, of course, promotes more testing.

In a major departure from the norm, the Sun has thirty different depth settings. After using the Sun, dialing a typical lancing device from '1' to '2' to '3' seems quite primitive. I've learned by trial and error that all my fingers have different skin textures and that each finger benefits from its own depth setting. From my pinky to my thumb, I change the depth setting incrementally from 0.4 to 0.9. On my pinky. 0.9 would hurt like heck. On my thumb, however, 0.4 wouldn't penetrate the skin. Once you’ve worked out the right depth setting for each finger, you're assured the amount of blood you need with only minimal pain.

The Sun’s cool gold color is nice too. But the real deal-maker is the way the Sun fires: When you press the button to fire the lancet, you feel the lancet come out and just softly brush against your finger. A second later, it enters with the softest touch. It's a little hard to explain, but amazing.

The manufacturer is currently working to transform the Pelikan Sun into a one-stop shop by building a meter into the device. I'm glad to hear it, because its only disadvantage right now is that it's bigger than I like to carry around. I'm sold on the company's ethics, too. As they say on their website, "All profits from the sale of Diacare products, including the Pelikan Sun, go towards Diabetes Australia-NSW's research, education, awareness, and advocacy programs."

All in all, the Pelikan Sun is heads above any other lancing device I've ever seen or tried.

At fifty years old, after 32 years of living with type 1 diabetes, Riva consulted a diabetes educator for the first time. That experience led her to combine her growing knowledge of diabetes care with her writing and illustrating talents. Today she is educating and inspiring others to live well with diabetes through her articles, research, and motivational lectures across the country. Riva is a contributor to Close Concerns, a diabetes consulting services firm in San Francisco. She also serves on the editorial committee of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International in New York City and on the Advisory Board of Methodist Hospital's Diabetes Education and Research Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. To learn more about her work and read her blog, visit her web site at: www.diabetesstories.com.