Advice for sleeping with defective sensors

Type 1 and LADA
41

Whatever happened to thinking and common sense? When you have an emergency you don’t go around trying to figure out why it happened, you deal with it in a way that makes you safer.

It’s no different than if your car breaks down at the side of the road in a dangerous neighborhood. You don’t call out to strangers and ask them what to do or how to fix your car. You don’t complain or commiserate with friends.

You find an alternate way to get to safety. In your case your destination is back in range until you can replace your machine.

Later, after it’s working, then you can go back and look at what you did wrong, if anything, and figure out how you can minimize the chance of it happening again.

This should have been covered in your pre-pump education, because CGM and infusion site failures are inevitable.

Switch to your emergency failure plan. Take the defective component out of the system until you have a safe time to replace it.

Whenever your CGM is not reliable, don’t trust it, whether day, night, during warmup doesn’t matter. Take readings with your finger stick BGM and enter them in your pump. Make corrections as needed.

If the CGM is dangerously off and overdosing, shut off the automatic/loop software such as Control IQ. If the pump is still beeping, unpair the CGM.

Before you went on a pump with loop technology or whatever your pump your endocrinologist should have established your basal profile which is used by all pumps as the dosing basis. You should know that profile by heart.

If your profile is reasonably close to accurate, and you haven’t eaten for 5 hours, you should be able enter your BG from your meter, use the pump bolus calculator to make a correction if needed and sleep through the night.

If you are too worried to do that use your phone to set up a series of alarms at 3 hour intervals and do fingerstick tests each time you wake. You aren’t trying to duplicate a perfect system, just stay somewhere in range.

In the morning after breakfast call Dexcom or whoever your CGM supplier is and tell them you got a failed sensor so they can send you a replacement.

Then look at the last spot where you had a good infusion site, use that for your next sensor placement.

Finally call your endocrinologist and tell them that you need more pump training than what buttons to click when everything works perfectly.

One thing to learn from this things don’t fix themselves.

Don’t do CGM and site changes late in the day see that something is wrong and hope things will get better. Don’t go to bed without knowing that you have SOME KIND of system that works tonkeep your BG in reasonable control

Making site changes in the morning after breakfast before lunch on staggered days is the ideal time to do it because you’re awake and there is plenty of time for the equipment to demonstrate whether it’s working properly or not. You can even test sites and sensors using glucose tabs for measured carbs and corrections

That gives you the opportunity to replace things and test the replacements or to switch to fingerstick testing and/or MDI until you have good sites for both.

My rule is of thumb are:

  • never go to sleep high or with too much IOB
  • never rely on a stranger to tell me what I need to know to stay alive.
1 Like
42

There are 2 types of people in the world.

1 – Those that are proactive, seize every problem as an opportunity in disguise and spend their time figuring out solutions and correcting how to avoid recurring issues oftentimes in advance. These folks tend to be healthier, wealthier, wiser, and happier most of the time.

2- Those that are reactive spend all their time figuring out who is at fault, whom to blame, and who is responsible for taking care of their problems. These folks tend to be less healthy, poorer, and miserable most of the time.

43

I tend to fall into your first category, but not because I was born that way. It developed as I had many negative practical experiences. I had no one else to turn to for anything except emotional support. That didn’t solve my problems. I had to learn how to think my way through social, fnancial and health problems if I wanted to survive. I’m still an emotional person; I just learned how to redirect the energy of feelings of anger and upset into a drive to find solutions.

I grew to enjoy solving problems. All problems have solutions, everyone of which is a compromise. Learning that “good enough”, was just that, was why I became an engineer. I could have become a doctor if I had been more interested in people than problems.

Knowing the good enough" principle has made it harder for me to deal with people who are unabe to mentally detach themselves from problems and can’t see those problems objectively as needing not perfect, but “good enough” solutions. They don’t see situations as problems but trouble, and their reaction is fight or flight, when stopping and thinking can find a solution.

mo The two kinds of people on a multi-dimensional spectrum are:

  • Those who tend believe everything can be divided in to two categories. Those people tend to join divisive groups like political parties and have unwavering polarized opinions about everything because it’s simpler than thinking and finding acceptable shades of grey.
  • Those who don’t. Those people know the world isn’t simple and focus on managing what they can control. They have positions about everything that can effect them, based on their knowldedge and experience, but understand that both are limited. They are eager to get more of both, and willing to compromise to deal with the reality that a half a loaf is better than going hungry.

No one is completely extreme in every dimension. I try to offer solutions and information to motivate persons who lack them, so they can assume the controls over their lives they have available. I hope and believe that the more information they have, in a form that they can use, accept and understand, the more likely they are to do so.

But my skills as a teacher are poor in comparison to those as a doer.