So the Dexcom has been a life saver. It has been showing us what happens to Chloe in between her insulin shots. Initially, we would only get a snapshot into her day. She would get a shot at breakfast, one at lunch and one at dinner. At meal times, her insulin would be calculated based on her blood sugar value at that moment, and that was that. It wasn’t until we got the Dexcom that we were be able to see the trends, was her level stable? was it increasing or decreasing? was it falling sharply or rising fast?. For the most part, we were blind. Typically, she would be around 7 mmol/l at breakfast, 10 mmol/l at lunch and 8 mmol/l at dinner. What we see now is that between breakfast and lunch she would be as high as 20 mmol/l and the rare time she dropped to below 3 mmol/l. HOLY CRAP!!!! Now we can see that we have to adjust her insulin so that she doesn’t have to high peaks or those dangerous lows.
As for the WTF moments, truly What the f**k just happened….. So, the Dexcom lets us sleep easy. We are comforted knowing that she isn’t going to have a low while she sleeps, which is my nightmare. Look at this picture:
So you can see that Chloe’s levels were high, but we corrected it with some extra insulin – then she was getting stable. Then, just after 10pm she dropped….a huge drop. 12 to 9 and then 6…. then it died “NO DATA” it said. Quickly checked her BSL and it was 11. So what the f**k happened? Well, this was called a compression reading. Apparently Chloe was sleeping on her sensor, which caused the blood to dissipate from the area. So as this was happening, her readings dropped until there was no blood in the area. Think of it like this: when you press your finger, the blood pushes out of the area, then when you release the pressure, the blood rushes back. Well this is what happened to Chloe. It all makes sense now…. but was a big WTF moment and scary as heck!