A1C is a bit higher than I’d like (works out to 6.6%), but to have zero serious lows this week makes Erin and I very happy.
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Awesome! You’re living the dream 
Seems like you’re also managing to keep him in a very narrow, tight range, which is fabulous.
Do you think you’re doing anything differently or just that as he’s getting older his numbers are settling out a little bit?
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The only thing that’s changed is that we are changing his “low” alerts at night. They now sound when he hits 100. Believe it or not, it doesn’t cause that much more beeping in the night. But the difference is that now I treat when he’s less than 100, instead of waiting until he’s already too low. Besides that, nothing’s changed. I change the alerts back to 70 when we are up and about.
Most of our lows were due to being asleep and not hearing, or catching the potential trouble sugars BEFORE they got low. With the higher alerts, we’re able to treat before he ever goes low. I hope it continues working, but as always, just when you think you have something figured out with Diabetes, you get smacked in the face and reminded that you don’t know much at all. lol. Like you, we just continue tweaking and hoping his body cooperates!
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that’s great! We’re steadily reducing Samson’s lows now that the more trained daycare workers are back from vacation – but we are still dealing with the nighttime lows and we’re still at 0.5% serious lows for the past two weeks, which is too high for me (I prefer to be under about 0.3%). The frustrating thing with Samson’s nighttime lows is that half of them are phantom lows – he drops to 77 and we test and he’s 100. Then the next time, he drops to 75 and he actually is 71. For the first time in a while I lowered his nighttime basal rate down to 0.075 from 0.1. We’ll see if that allows us a better night’s rest.
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I still have two very serious problems during the night as well.
First, I don’t always CHECK HIS BG’S before actually treat. I KNOW I should be doing this, but this is the “awake” me talking. The “sleeping” me just wants to get back to sleep. So I sometimes hear an alarm and, if it’s showing as higher, I’ll administer a small bolus (usually .15 - .25 if he’s up around 200). The problem with not checking, though, is that the very time you DON’T check…his BG’s were actually somewhere around 130…then the .15 to .25 causes him to drop (and often times very quickly.) I’m trying to get better at this, but honestly, I’m dead to the world at 3AM and although I hear the alarms, I just want to make them stop. I am the only person that gets up during the night - my wife hears nothing, ever.
Second, I sometimes don’t calibrate when it’s required during the night. What this causes is SEVERE differences in what the receiver says, and what his BG actually are. So, some mornings I wake up and I say “NICE!!! He stayed 120 all night!”…then I check his BG’s and they’re 200. 
I have to learn to get up to do actual calibrations during the night.
You know how tough it is to get up at night…hopefully I get better with these two things because it’s just laziness on my part. I just have to change my mindset. I’m one of those people who can just pop right out of bed each morning and be ready for my day…bouncing along and being cursed at by those people that mope about. But during the night, when I know I still have a number of hours to sleep still, I just don’t want to “wake myself up” so that I can’t get back to sleep…so I often times take the lazy path – I know I need to get better.
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What time do you usually do your 12 hr calibrations?
I should standardize them, but I haven’t as of yet…whenever the blooddrop shows up, we try to do it as soon as the arrow is straight. 10PM and 10AM would be best, but we end up gaining 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there and that’s why we end up having calibrations showing up at 3AM sometimes.
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Way to go Liam! The brains of the family! 
We don’t always check his finger before treating either at night and we only recently started doing that to troubleshoot a particular problem… I think that if you’ve calibrated recently you don’t have to do a finger prick for every treatment.
But we were finding this persistent problem where he seemed to go low and it made no sense – and after getting a higher than expected A1C and a few times of checking and seeing him be much higher i just decided a few days ago I was sick of just “responding” in the moment to those alarms every night and wanted to really focus on getting ahead of them by avoiding any lows on Dexcom, at all. My goal is that 5 nights out of 7, no one has to wake up to a low or high alarm.
When you’re tired it’s so easy to just do the minimal thing. I don’t think it’s lazy at all; I think it’s a survival instinct. I just read a (depressing) article that one night of sleep deprivation looks similar to 6 months of insulin resistance in the body, just in terms of how your body functions. So I wouldn’t beat yourself up about not doing the calibrations. We find they’re fine if they’re generally done twice a day, not exactly 12 hours apart (could be 7 hours apart or as much as 17 hours apart).
Re: sleep deprivation. We finally had to split up nighttimes even though my husband is better than me at getting up and is naturally more of a night owl. Because the reality is, after say 5 or 6 nights in a row of sleep deprivation, even the lightest of sleepers or someone predisposed to staying awake then will sometimes snooze through alarms. And we were finding a lot of lows were happening and he would say to me in his sleep “yes I treated” but he actually hadn’t. I think it’s just an ungovernable physiological force at some level of deprivation. So we really don’t go more than 3 or 4 days “on” for the nights anymore.
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What an amazing report! This is great!
I never thought it would be possible with a toddler. I am so impressed!
We have seen the same thing. I think your conclusion is totally right - more than 3-4 nights on is not reliable.