Wow @Randy5 that’s a lot to respond to in a single comment. Cost depends on insurance, or lack thereof. In the latter case, damned expensive. For me, with pretty decent (at least for the moment) BCBS coverage, and stipulating this is for a Dexcom G5, it’s something like $80-120/month. You can extend the life of the sensors by at least 2x beyond the official replacement period, so that makes it cheaper than it might look on paper.
The eyesight thing isn’t something I have experience with, but a Dexcom receiver is no harder to read than a standard BG tester, maybe even easier if you use the smartphone app. But if touchscreen manipulation is a challenge you can do it all with the stand-alone receiver, which uses a 4-direction click-and-select button, similar to a simplified TV remote. The sensor insertion process is also pretty simple but might be a problem if you have lost a lot of fine motor control. There are some finicky aspects to it–getting the adhesive patch smoothed down, squeezing tabs to release the insertion device and so on. I never had or requested a hands-on demo when I got mine but it might be worth contacting their sales dept and seeing if they offer that for people with impairments.
The core question is, “Do I NEED this,” or “How will this help?” Probably the primary use case for an adult is if you have problems sensing lows and/or are susceptible to overnight lows, it will alert you to them. For my insurance, my endo had to certify that I’d had some particular number of hypos in the 3 months previous to her recommending it, which wasn’t a problem. As always, hypos seem to be the thing that officialdom is most concerned about. “We don’t care if you go DKA, just don’t have a hypo!!!” is a slight exaggeration of the mindset, an outgrowth of “We can’t believe we have to let you people dose yourselves with this dangerous drug completely without supervision!!!” But beyond that, it’s enormously helpful for all kinds of things because it’s a dynamic representation of what your BG is doing, not a static snapshot like you get with fingersticks. Which is invaluable for dealing with, for example, what your BG is doing during exercise, or pre-bolusing before a meal, so you can time your carb consumption against when the insulin actually starts to take effect, and so on. For a sugar-normal person there is a whole network of internal signaling loops that regulate this stuff, but since we have to do it manually this is MUCH closer to giving you that kind of information flow so you can approximate that lost capacity
As for being hooked up to something 24/7, well… The sensor is exceedingly fine, like a human hair, so unlike a pump canula you’re really unaware of it except in the rare case where the insertion impinges on a nerve, blood vessel or other sensitive area. But yeah, there’s a thing stuck to you all the time. If that concept has dissuaded you from getting a pump a CGM might still be worth considering–it’s generally less obtrusive than most pumps are.
