I've been attached to Mr. Dex for just over 24 hours now. More like 28. Here is what I have discovered so far:
1. He's not always in sink with my actual blood sugar. In other words, I might be 5.0 but he might think I'm 4.0. He hasn't been too far off, and he responds fairly well to calibrations, but at 3am, it makes a difference. My first night with him he went off about 8 times. He kept thinking I was 3.9 but I was actually hovering right around 5.0. How did I know? Because I checked my blood sugar 8 times between 9pm and 5am. That is 6-7 more times than I normally check - when I don't have a continuous glucose monitor attached to me. And I calibrated almost every time I checked. And yet Mr. Dex still kept freaking out. I turned off the noise so he just vibrated. I then tucked him in bed with me to keep him quiet. I finally resorted to sleeping directly on him to shut him the hell up.
2. I did not run on Thursday morning. Partly because I'm exhausted and a little too busy at work right now. And partly because Mr. Dex kept me up all night. So my blood sugar did not have to deal with a morning exercise routine. It was pretty sweet to watch the graph as I hovered around 6.0 between breakfast and lunch and hovered around 5.0 between lunch and dinner. I'm guessing those basal rates are pretty good - at least on days when I don't exercise.
3. Mr. Dex prevents me from making decisions I would normally make. Last night I was a little high two hours after dinner (11.0). I was hungry before bed and would normally have bolused and eaten a snack knowing I would go higher than 11.0 but then drop back down again overnight. I also know that Mr. Dex is set to alarm if my BG goes higher than 13.0 (or lower than 4.0 for the record). After the previous night's symphony, I decided I'd rather go to bed hungry than spend the night dealing with high BG alarms. It may have been a good decision since late night snacking is not typically encouraged but not a decision I would normally have made. So he will most likely have an impact on my lifestyle choices.
4. He's not nearly as annoying as I thought he'd be in terms of feeling him under my clothes or carrying around another device. I need to remind myself to grab him off my desk before I leave work or toss him in my purse before I leave the house but, otherwise, he's been pretty tame. So far. I'm expecting a few growing pains as we get used to each other but I think he'll slip into my routine fairly easily.
I'll try to post a few photos next week for those of you who asked where I put him or what he looks like. By Monday we should have bonded a little more and gotten used to each other's quirks. He'll have survived a curling bonspiel as well as a family reunion AND and a family dinner. How's that for an initiation weekend?
Stay tuned for more adventures of Mr. Dex.
I hope the night-times improve! That was one of my big complaints with CGM: it would get stuck on an inaccurate low reading at night and I'd eventually just turn it off. One of the phone tech people said this can happen at night because fluids aren't moving around the sensor as much as during the day ... or something like that! Anyway, when it's working, those little graphs can be very useful and interesting!
ReplyDeleteHi Celine - well done for getting the G4 - I'm a Type 1 and have been using it for the last 18 months - absolutely brilliant, especially for exercise - the sensors do take about 24 hours to settle in but then track the BGs pretty accurately for up to three weeks. When putting a new sensor in I often insert it before going to bed and wait until the morning to tell the receiver it's got a new sensor and calibrate it two hours later. So glad you can get these in Canada now - I'm in the UK but have a Canadian cousin with Type 1. Best wishes, Ian
ReplyDeleteYou'll probably figure all of this out soon, but the biggest change in thinking I had to do when I started using CGM was to realize that the number itself doesn't really matter quite as much as the shape of the CGM graph. Where am I (approximately)? Is my BG going up or down? And part of that change in thinking was to realize that the sensor is telling me what my BG might have been 15 minutes ago. So unless my BG isn't going anywhere, I probably shouldn't expect them to match.
ReplyDeleteOf course, at 3AM, I do wish they were a little closer to each other.