I’m a new Dexcom user, just started my first sensor 3 days ago! I love it so far! It was so easy! But I have a question–
It seems like for the first 2-ish days it wasn’t really accurate at all, but on day 3 it seems to have settled in and is matching up really well to what my meter is telling me. Is this pretty common? I’ve read in a few other discussions that it can take a while to start reading more accurately. But is there anything I can do to shorten the time it takes to “settle”? Does this question even make sense? Hopefully it does!
That’s pretty normal. For me the first day usually doesn’t even work…I get a lot of ??? forr 10 hours at a time and then it stabilizes. The best numbers I’ve gotten is after day 5…which isn’t good since it lasts 2 days before switching it out again.
I think it really just depends on the sensor and where you’ve placed it. Sometimes it takes awhile mine usually only take a couple hours when I’m active. If I put it in shortly before bed though it’s always struggling until lunch the next day. I’m not sure why that is. The more you use it the more you’ll learn little tricks to get it to work best for you.
My first tip would be to stay hydrated. I get much fewer “???” in the first week of using a sensor if I stay decently hydrated.
The second tip, which is really a learning process, is figuring out when to calibrate the Dexcom. You can test your blood sugar as much as you care to (though hopefully you will find that less necessary now), but only put in calibrations when your sugar is fairly steady. New users often assume more calibrations must be better, but it’s really the opposite. Just 2 a day is all it asks for, and more will usually just throw it off balance.
I think that most people have the same experience as you, that the first day is not very accurate. My most accurate readings come between days 3 and 10. (You can restart the sensors after day 7 and get a few more days out of them.) You will get a lot of different advise from users of this site. I think that the success that people have is very indivdual. At one time I thought that I needed to calibrate a lot during the first day, and now I tend to agree with Andy that fewer calibrations is better. In any case, definitely calibrate when you are at a steady state. Good luck and welcome to the club.
Allen
