I often sleep through my Dex alarming for high or low and then wake up only to find I’ve been at 15 mmol/L or, worse, 3 mmol/L for the past five hours. I’ve worn a fitbit for years and use its silent vibrating alarm on my wrist to wake me up each morning, and I never sleep through that. I like to keep my Dex on vibrate during the day, but I’ve started to set it to one of the loud audible profiles in an attempt to not sleep through it, which gets annoying during the day. Plus, I still manage to roll over and ignore the Dex if it alarms and I don’t feel like getting up to check it.
I just came across this product called a SpiBand which is like a mini version of the SpiBelt. It goes around your wrist and holds small objects like keys or cards. I decided to order one to wear while I sleep and put my Dex receiver in there, so that I can keep it on my wirst and keep the Dex on vibrate, but still wake to its alarms.
I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know for sure that it will work, but I think it will. And if it doesn’t, it’s only $10 and I could use it to hold Rockets (US: Smarties) during exercise.
That looks like a good solution. I look forward to your report. Up until a few years ago, I avoided strapping anything to my wrist. Now I wear a fitbit and medical ID on one wrist and an Apple Watch on the other. I’ll be interested to know how comfortable this storage band is on your wrist.
I haven’t used that one, but I did use the one from Tally Gear, which is made specifically for diabetes supplies. It’s got a window so you can read the Dex number!
Here’s a picture from their website. No, that’s not my arm!
I think the guys here are missing how it’s supposed to work. The Dexcom is supposed to wake up your wife. Because she’s mad the Dexcom woke her up, she yells at you and that wakes you up.
Yes, but it doesn’t work that way. If my Dexcom goes off because I am high and my wife wakes me up that is great. I go and take a correction. But my blood sugar may not normalize for hours. In that time my Dexcom will continue to alert. I could silence it, but then what is the point. And my wife is the light sleeper so I am in the doghouse no matter what I do.
You can turn the repeat off. Do you let it keep going?!
In the high example, if the repeat is off, it will alarm when it first goes over your high number, and keep alarming every 5 minutes until you acknowledge it. But once you acknowledge it, it won’t alarm for that same high again, unless it goes back under, and then above (which it views as a completely different high).
For a normal low, I think it’s the same, but I don’t think you can turn off an urgent low.
Sorry to add some serious discussion to the fun here…
This is one of the most annoying quirks of the Dexcom! I hate when I’m skirting my high limit and the thing goes off every 10 minutes as I go aboe and below the line. I usually end up raising or lowering the high limit, but I wish that they would make a feature where the alert would not repeat until your set “snooze” time once initially acknowledged.
I don’t turn repeat off. I have set the high repeat to 60 minutes and the low repeat to 15 minutes. I want to be prudent about whether the treatment of my low or high worked.
I just have a Dexcom belt case Attached to a athletic headband that I twist on my wrist at night. I sleep on my side in the fetal position so I can hear. Been doing this for years.
I use an iPhone as my receiver for my dexcom G5. That allowed me to add an Apple Watch to the setup. This provides me a convenient way to have a handy and discrete monitoring tool. More importantly, I sleep with the watch on my wrist and the vibrating alarm on it wakes me up when I sometimes go low at night vs the actual receiver. I even leave my phone connected to power in my kitchen and the range is good enough to connect the transmitter to my phone and the phone to the watch. It’s also awesome for exercise because it works as my Fitbit like device and dexcom readout.
