Together, the three of us make a great diabetes team. Not that we do actual battle with diabetes but we sure do work together to keep him in his corner.
As soon as he starts acting up, Dexter takes notice and sends out a bat signal.
Rose spots it and starts vibrating to pass along the message and then I step in with my bag of tricks (insulin, emergency carbs, water, exercise and a voodoo doll) and together in our slapstick way we bring things back to the way we like them.
We slay the vampires so to speak.
I like to pretend we're like this trio - only a little more 2015ish. I keep flip-flopping between whether I want to be Willow or Buffy. I'm leaning towards Willow. And Rose is totally Buffy in her fancy pink coat.
Anyway, so the three of us make a great team.
Which made it all the more disconcerting when things started to go wrong last week. I was at day 9 of my sensor and things were fine until I got out from the shower last Wednesday morning. Instead of seeing my blood glucose number on Rose's screen, I saw the dreaded ??? instead.
I hooked her back up anyway and crossed my fingers. About two hours later, she buzzed to tell me that my blood sugar was 3.9 (which it was) but it took two hours for the ??? to go away.
The next day, it happened again. Right after my shower. And about two hours later, everything was fine. That night, I changed my CGM sensor hoping that was the problem.
The following morning the same thing happened. It happened on Wednesday and Thursday with my old sensor and it happened on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday with my new one. Each day was the same pattern. Something was happening in the shower that messed things up.
Since not showering was not an option, I really needed to figure this out.
So, on Monday, I called Animas Tech Support and found myself speaking to a nice guy in California. He walked me through some of the things that it could be and none of them seemed to fit. He explained that seeing ??? meant that the sensor was reading my blood glucose but could not make any sense of what it was reading. Which eliminated the possibility that it was a transmitter battery problem.
He said that it could be a problem with the back of the transmitter getting wet during my shower but we both agreed that was odd considering it never happened before and now it was happening every single day. Plus, I added, when I go swimming for 90 minutes, I never experienced any problems with Dexter finding Rose again afterwards (I didn't actually use their names for the record).
He finally concluded that I may have simply had two faulty sensors and he agreed to send me two new ones immediately.
Hopefully he's right.
I don't like it when Dexter sends a bat signal and Rose isn't able to read it. It kinda freaks me out.
I spent the first 10 1/2 years with diabetes flying blind. Relying on finger pricks to keep my numbers in check and going to bed every night crossing my fingers that I would wake up if I had a problem.
I've come to rely on my CMG and the feeling of security that it brings. Missing that for 2 hours every morning, particularly right after breakfast and a run, is really disconcerting.
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