The Scariest Moments

The Scariest Moments

(IE: I Love Our Dexcom)

      First, let me say that the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) is one of the best inventions ever. The Dexcom G4 is probably the best of the CGM’s currently available in the US. When your kid is a type 1 diabetic and cannot tell you when they feel high or low, aside from testing them a hundred times a day, a CGM is the only way to go. Luckily our insurance covered it no problem, so we had our CGM training in under a month after diagnosis. Since then, it has literally saved her life more than once.

      But the first and scariest time was on Memorial Day, 2013. She normally naps about 2 hours, starting immediately after lunch. So I fed her the normal carb amount (then 30-35g), gave the normal bolus, and put her down. She was in the 120’s before lunch and had a medium range glycemic food. About 45 minutes into her nap, her Dexcom alerted that she was going low. (We have it programmed for anything below 90). I hated to wake her up to check her blood since she generally won’t fall back asleep for naps, but the trend was going down. Better safe than sorry! So I trudged up there, checked her blood, and had my first mini-stroke. It was a 44! I ran back downstairs for the insta-glucose and more test strips. As I was having her drink the glucose pack, I double checked it and it was a 46! She was super hard to wake up and was sweaty to the point of soaking the sheets. She starting screaming when I woke her up, alerting my husband to the fact there was a problem (he was sunbathing in the yard). After a mere 45 minutes into a 2 hour stretch of napping, she had dropped almost a hundred points.

     I shudder to think if we hadn’t had the Dexcom and had waited for her to wake up on her own. I will let her sleep 3 hours before I wake her up if she’s not yet up so she would have been up there going lower and lower for another two hours. I would have had a dead-in-the-bed kid. I had to go and lay down for a couple hours after that because I was so sick at the thought. Let’s just say we had already applied to our insurance company for the pump (to better regulate her dosing since the syringes couldn’t get the micro-dosing she needed), and I had them on the phone the next day putting a emergency status on the “review”.  More on that insurance fight next post.

Dexcom CGM Monitor on her stomach