It started out great…line was relatively level, only going down by 2 to 5 BG per 5 min. I fed him (in his sleep, because he eats in his sleep) 5 carbs worth of cheese crackers at around 10PM because we were all tired and going to bed early. I didn’t hear ANY alarms / sirens and I wok up at around 0430 to find out that Liam had been LOW for around 45 minutes and under 60 for about 90 minutes.
Overview of the evening (it was going alright until it crept too low)
He seems totally fine and I had to give him a box of juice to bring him back up, but this type of event scares the ever living crap out of me. I guess I need that receiver after all…it causes itself and 2 phones to “siren” when he starts going low. I did hear the 0430 alerts, so have no idea why I didn’t hear the earlier (more dangerous) ones. I checked our settings and the “Urgent Lows” are only set up to alert me every 30 minutes…which I think is crap…I want to know every tick if there’s an urgent low (every 5 minutes)…but there’s no way I can change this. I’ll check our “new” receiver once it arrives, but I believe the earliest we can get alerts is ever 15 minutes (and I’m not sure why my iPhone G5 Mobile app would be set to every 30 minutes.
Anyway…I wasn’t able to go back to sleep after 0430…I spent the remainder of the morning internalizing my anger at myself for not waking up (lots of silent curse words being said to myself.)
If I slept through one of these events and something very bad ever happened to him, I’d never be able to live with myself.
My receiver is broken atm so I can’t check it but to my knowledge the lowest I can go is 15 minutes. I’ll definitely check it when I get my receiver (being overnighted to us). I can’t update the Dexcom G5 Mobile App at all, though.
I didn’t have these issues prior to my receiver going out…I don’t know if I slept through the alerts (not like me), but having the extra alerts/sirens doesn’t hurt (it’s more annoying, but I can handle annoyances if it means my son is safe.)
That is indeed a very rough night. Don’t beat yourself up to bad, things happen. Our kids’ bodies are more resilient than we give them credit for, but this is scary even with that said.
This setting makes the repeat for a “low” alert the same as an “urgent low” alert.
It will give you an alert every 5 minutes until you acknowledge. Once you acknowledge, it will repeat again 30 minutes later if it is still low. For me it is like the “low alert snooze alarm”. And man, it can really irritate your wife!
EDIT:
Well, I mean my wife. I hope it doesn’t irritate your wife, or else we have a whole different set of problems…
I have had the same thing happen when I am very tired, after multiple days of bad nights. That is where the receiver really helps because the phone alarms aren’t that loud.
How does your receiver cause 2 phones to siren btw? The phones are independent of the receiver, and alarm separately.
These things happen. It sucks and it’s super scary but I try to console myself that those intrepid souls who came of age in the 60s and 70s slept through the night without any idea they were going low often for hours.
Don’t beat yourself up about it. Humans need a certain amount of sleep and deprivation can make us do dumb things. We need to set up systems for safety that can work with that biological, insanely strong urge to sleep sometimes. Maybe set aside time with your wife tonight or over the weekend to problem solve: Figure out a solution to make sure the system has some built-in safety checks.
For instance, our in-laws can see our Share data. We forbid them from contacting us on the regular about it during the day, but the one exception is if our father-in-law sees Samson is low at night and there is no sign on Night Scout that the low has been treated, he’ll call us. Its not perfect but it’s an additional layer of safety.
My husband has Night Watch on his Android phone – is that something you have? Seems like the alarms are a lot more robust than in dexcom share, which basically NEVER alarms for me for whatever reason. I also bring my computer in, put NightScout on with the computer screen on, when I am asleep.
We also got this thing called a D-Link WiFi siren, which I keep pushing my husband to set up for the same reason; he doesn’t often wake up to the alarms when it’s his turn to keep track of Samson, which means I wake up, then vigorously wake him up. But when I was on the flight to Israel, I looked at the Dexcom data the next day and saw Samson was LOW for hours.
I tried nightsscout / xDrip+ had difficulties getting everything to work correctly so put it on the back burner for now. Definitely plan on figuring everything out more once it becomes necessary (when he starts school for instance).
My “share” ability stopped working whenever my receiver went kaput. I know the G5 mobile isn’t paired with the receiver, but when the receiver went out, the sharing stopped on my iPhone, with my wife’s phone.
“You cannot use the Share feature with the Dexcom G5 Mobile Receiver” means that the receiver cannot function as a source for the share: you need an iPhone to be receiving the transmitter stream. Then the iPhone will connect to the server, and send the data stream to the server.
Then all the slave share devices will receive the info stream from the server.
Since the sharing has nothing to do with the receiver, it is some weird coincidence that they went out at the same time.
[EDIT] Clarification: the reason why the receiver cannot function as a source for the share is that the receiver does not have a way to be in communication with the server. The only communicating ability it has is Bluetooth with the transmitter.
So this is one where I’m not actually sure *how it can be set up to work with Dexcom, except I know that someone HAS set it up somehow, because I got the tip from some other Facebook group about D-care that I’m a member of.
We keep putting it off but it does seem like it connects to various alarming things…so hopefully there’s a way to hack it.
