Arm-Chair Diabetes

He had balked at putting the Dexcom CGM on the back of his arm, but for $25, he is willing to try it. I winced as he pushed down the plunger. It is not a small needle that inserts the filament. Luckily, it needs only to be changed out every week or two. This placement is an experiment in an effort to get a little more sleep for me.

His favorite place to wear the transmitter is on his leg - more fat there, making insertion less painful. The location works well as long as he is awake. In sleep, he rolls over on it with all of his new grown up body. The blood in that area doesn't circulate and the sensor thinks the blood there has no glucose. It sends out an alarm to wake the dead, the dead being me. It doesn't seem to rouse him at all.

I had two choices: bribe him to try a new location or run his BG higher at night than I would like. He took the bribe.

I'd like to tell you that last night, I slept like a deaf dog (because in my experience, babies don't sleep) and we eliminated compression lows. We did eliminate compression lows, but sleep was elusive again. For some perverse reason, diabetes decided to actually make him go low at night, lasting until 4 a.m. I have written Basal Program 51 (meaning I've changed his basal rate at least 51 times in the past three years) to try to stop the nighttime lows.

The red dots show when he was low. Ideally, I'd like him to be between 90 and 100 all night.

The lack of data prior to 11 a.m. was during new sensor warm-up.