Last night before bed, my blood was 94 according to my meter. The Dex was hovering around 75 or so. Then within an hour of going to bed low alarm. I felt fine, so I just hit the button and kept on sleeping. This kept happening every half hour or so until about 5am when I finally checked my blood and was 84 and entered the number into the Dex so it would show a higher number. At that point I also disabled the low alarm. But alas, the Dex thought I was going below 50 so it kept alarming.
When I ultimately woke up (can I really call it that, when I didn't sleep?) at 7:30a I checked my BS and it was 125. Fine. Entered it in and now at 8:15a Dex is finally showing my number at 122.
What else could I have done in the middle of the night to get my Dex to stop alarming so I could sleep through the night?
Hopefully this won't happen again any time soon, but all suggestions would be helpful!
In the Alarms settings when you set the value for the low alarm you can also set a “snooze time”. This snooze time tells it how long to wait before alarming again. I think you can set it for up to 5 hours. There are two problems. 1) If you sugars are dancing around the low setting then each time they cross below it it will restart that clock. 2) It only works if the Dex is reading you above 55, I haven’t found a way to disable the very low alarm factory set at 55. Sometimes if the Dex is reading far enough off from my blood check and it doesn’t seem to adjust well when I input my value I’ll input it again. My suggestion is to do this only if you actually do two blood checks just to make sure you’re not inputting an incorrect value. When I started there were quite a few nights with little sleep but it’s gotten better! Good luck.
If you just want to disable the Dex and you don’t want to go thru the 3 readings 15 minutes apart, especially when it is at night & you just want some z’s, disable the out of range alarm & put the Dex in another room.
I pulled my manual out to look something else up and came across this that I did not realize before - amazing what you can learn when you look at the instructions! On page 78, it talks about a temporary shutdown. I did not realize that was what the shutdown feature on the menu was for. You can temporarily shut it down and it says just hold down any key to turn the receiver back on again. That would probably be the easiest thing to do if it is driving you crazy at night.
I’ve only had a couple nights of false low alarms with the Dex and both times I had been laying on the sensor for quite some time. Usually I roll around enough at night to keep things moving. In those cases rolling over fixed it. With the Minimed system I found that being a little dehydrated would tend to contribute to false lows too. I’m not sure if the same holds true for Dex but I try to make sure I’m drinking enough especially since it’s finally summer here in Washington State.
Also if my dex was reading that much lower in the low range I would have calibrated the 94 reading. Usually for me when Dex gets a little off a single calibration would bring it in line.
Also if I need to I adjust alarms to get sleep I will do so ie raise the high alarm at night, increase the snooze, or set the low as low as will do the job. Unfortunately that doesn’t help with a false 55 though.
