Ever see LOW on your PDM?

When I saw this on my PDM it scared me because I’ve never seen it before. I had an eye doctor appointment yesterday for my retinopathy and after taking many pictures of both eyes, he said that he needed to burn some blood vessels in my right eye with the laser. I wasn’t worried because this isn’t the first time for laser treatments. As matter of fact when looking at the pictures of my eyes, you would think you were looking at the moon with all the craters. After the laser treatment, I drove home and went in a dark room and rested a couple of hours because any light would bother my eyes. I got up to go to the bathroom and noticed that my BS must be on the low side so I tested it. My PDM did not indicate any number but instead showed “LOW”, which I have never seen before. I treated the low with a juice box and brought it up to 92 which I am fine with. Later I looked in the PDM manual about the LOW and it indicated that my blood sugar was less than 20! What was strange and scary was that I felt low but it felt like a 50 or 60 low, not a 20 low. I woke up this morning at 108 Woohoo!!

To Stress: In the two years I have been on the pod, I have not had that reading. You might want to call Omni pod to confirm what it means. Also, I always double check a very low or high reading with a second test, to make sure there wasn't an error on the first reading. Finally, I am a brittle diabetic ,and I imagine you are as well. I finally went on the Dexcom continuous monitor, which will alert me to falling or rising blood sugar. As soon as I go out of "good" range , it will alarm/vibrate etc so that I can stop a crash before it gets too low. This is also reassuring when I am asleep. I would check in to this...my endo highly recommends it. If your insurance will cover it, it is a big help. Eventually there will be technology that combines the PDM /dexcom readings...maybe for use with the IPHONE. But for now, I use both! Good luck with your retinopathy...

I too advise the CGM, if you can swing it. But in the meantime, I suppose if I had gotten the low reading, I would do another test and if it still read low, I would use a separate meter to check for accuracy. I have caught the Omni in an inaccurate low reading on a couple of occasions that a second test confirmed was not correct.

Yep, that's low. Scary huh? Glad to hear you treated it quickly and easily. I've seen it before too. One reason I added a Dexcom to my set of control tools.

In cases like this I always retest. My blood sugar is currently high, but as an experiment I went to the bathroom, put a strip in my PDM, washed my hands and tested my blood sugar. I got 30. Then I *dried* my hands, actually poked my finger and did a proper test and got 233 (yuk, must remember never to drink Becks low alcohol beer again.)

The strips need such a small amount of fluid that it's very easy to get a mis-reading around water.

John Bowler

I haven't had the low message but gotten the high message a bunch

Yeah to the retest.

I'd also recommend a second meter if possible. I haven't been keeping up with the issue but the Omnipod meter had a tendency to read low. Maybe it's something that's been addressed, but that tendency combined with my issues getting Freestyle strips covered made me completely abandon the PDM as a BG meter.

Anyway, glad you are ok!

Thanks all - I guess I should have retested but when I saw LOW, I went into carb mode to raise it. Next time for sure!

Abbott recalled all the FreeStyle test strips with a date prior to 8/2015 - well, they actually said don't use *any* of the current test strips and started manufacturing ones that work reliably with the Omnipod. Supposedly the issue is fixed, but I haven't kept up with the discussions on the recall.