Wake Up Call

My phone rang this morning at 4:21.  Here’s the conversation that followed…

Me:  What’s wrong, why are you calling me?

Friend:  Are you OK?  Your low alarm’s been going off.

Me (on the way to the bathroom to test):  I don’t know, nothing went off here.  Oh, it says 50.

Friend:  It’s been going off for a while.

Me:  I’m 57, so the alarm is right.  I’ll eat something and go back to bed.  Thanks.

My phone isn’t always making noise lately – sometimes a CGM alarm or a text notification will only vibrate, which typically won’t wake me up.  I realized on my way back to bed this morning that my friend had texted me 3 minutes before she called, and the first low alarm had gone off 15 minutes before that.  I ate 6 peanut butter M&Ms and went back to sleep, and from there it looks like my CGM went a little nuts; another alarm sounded loudly later in the morning.  Unfortunately the monitor thought my sugar was 45, the reality was actually double that. 

Did my friend, who I’ve called my chief sugar stalker, save my life this morning?  Probably not, because a 57 isn’t desperately low.  But I could have kept falling, and that’s not a risk either of us want to take.  The share feature is a big part of why I got a Dexcom in the first place.  It’s good to have back up, a safety net that makes all of us feel like I’m safer than I might have been before.  It’s not perfect, or it wouldn’t have gone off later for no reason at all.  As frustrating as those false alarms can be, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.  Fortunately my friends are willing to put up with them too.

I was low for a while the first time, though given the random looking numbers that followed I suspect the number started going up much faster than what was reported.  The second time the CGM couldn't have been much more inaccurate...what looks like a sudden increase in my blood glucose was after I recalibrated and told the Dexcom app it was wrong.  The red line is my low boundary of 55, the yellow at the top is 140.