Christmas Day on the Dexcom

It was all going so well…

Until we sat down to watch Cars 2 and opened the chocolates…

Looking from the left, the little red crosses are blood meter tests (fingerprick tests) and the blue circles are readings from the meter every five minutes. There are occasional gaps where the Dexcom receiver looses connection with the transmitter attached to the sensor. Other than that, you can see the real value of the Dexcom. I tested him once at 2am on Christmas Day because he was running a little on the low side Christmas Eve, and then about half an hour after we got up at 6.45am.

For the rest of the whole of Christmas Day, we just followed what the Dexcom was saying. He was dosing for Carbs as he went through the day but managed to keep in range really well, until we hit the dreaded chocolate. Even then, testing him at 9pm (13.3), 10.20pm (14), 12.30am (9.5) and 4am (10.9), wasn’t toooooo bad. I corrected him at 4am and he has come down to 6.something this morning, and we are back to just glancing at the Dexcom.

In some ways, the last 24 hours has been a microcosm of our whole experience to date on the Dexcom trial, especially once we learnt to trust it. Your not supposed to put to much faith in the numbers, just use the trends. Inevitablly, however, you look at both. My standard question now for Samuel is “What does your Dexcom say…?”. He glances at the receiver, tells me the number and the direction of the arrow. It gives you a lot more confidence of where he is at any one time, and we only need to resort to blood tests when things seem to be going awry.

Like when he starts eating chocolates!