Got my CGM leash yanked twice last night for false alarms:
I was 99% sure they were erroneous—I mean, just look at those curve lines. I’ve been at this a LONG time and I know my patterns. No-carb dinner, so no lingering bolus insulin, not to mention the first alarm was like 6 hrs after dinner. So “compression low” methinks. EXCEPT when it yanked me awake I was on my left side, opposite the shoulder I have my sensor on. “Musta rolled over in my sleep,” I guessed, though that’s pretty unusual for me bc I have arthritis in my shoulders that wakes me if I’ve been on one side too long and makes the process of rolling over pretty awkward and painful in its own right. It’s not something I can easily manage without coming fully awake, more’s the pity. Still, I couldn’t figure out what else it might have been, given that abrupt a drop and the fact that I didn’t feel at all low, so I cancelled the alert and went back to sleep. Very emphatically ON MY LEFT SIDE.
So all’s well until just before my usual get-up time when it went off again. SEVERE LOW this time, breaking-glass alert sound, iPhone notification showing 50 with a straight down arrow. Now I was absolutely on my LEFT side, position unchanged from 5 hrs earlier, and wasn’t even fully asleep this time but had been dozingly hoping for a brief return to dreamland (hey, I’m retired, I don’t need to be up yet). I have my basal rate set to compensate for DP starting around 3am, but that’s not going to produce a drop like that. Sure enough, when I did get up and do a finger stick the meter said 88, which is a bit below avg for me on rising but not remotely a hypo reading.
So chalk this up to “Weird sh** that happens with T1” I guess but I’m now pretty uncertain what to do about it if anything. It’s a 2-day old sensor, so should be out of the erratic phase, but I’m really not looking forward to another night like this. Guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on it all day and if it seems like a bad-sensor issue I’ll just have to swap it out and call Dexcom for a replacement. Fortunately they’re pretty generous about that.