As the title says. I am wondering how long people use their sensors with restarts? What sites? Any issues as results being far apart at calibration and such?
21 days 5 hours on upper arm.
5 hours after 3rd “restart” “questionmarks” popped up and I removed the sensor
Calibration: 2.6 per day
After “start” and subsequent “restart” and “warm-up” sensor was off by 10-15 units at each calibration for the first 24 hours. After that, day 2-7, it usually was between 3-8 units off. Always showing lower in Dexcom app on iOS device than control BGM (Omnipod PDM).
Different locations on my body take longer to dial in the sensor for accuracy than others. My abdomen is the least accurate and takes 4-5 days to become remotely accurate. My back takes one day to dial in. When I restart them, the second session dials in much faster since the probe is adequately “soaked” IMO. Longest I go is 14 days in one spot just to give my sensitive skin a chance to recover.
We can always get 14 days, that is completely easy and normal for us on the back of the arms. 21 days happens pretty routinely, although data for us in the third week has a higher than normal dispersion i.e. it goes from a line to a little cloud of measurements.
i’m curious to know about dexcoms accuracy. how long does it take before it becomes accurate from the time of the sensor session? the last one i test-drove (endo’s model G5), it took 3 days before i got accurate readings. after that it stayed accurate through the 10th day (one restart). i did wear it in the pool, 2 hours a day, 4 days a week, though; dont know if that should matter.
i wore it on the back of my upper arm.i have nowhere fleshy enough to put it on my tummy, otherwise that would deff use that location. also, if i slept on top of it by mistake, it would set off the LOW alarms all night long.
so my question here is about accuracy. i am also curious about how that would pertain to the direction arrows.
I occasionally get strange "off’ readings where it jumps 20+ points from one reading in 5 minutes to the next with the arrow pointing straight up and than slowly creeps back to normal readings within 6-8 readings (30-40 minutes). 90% of those are trending up while I have the tendency to believe from my experience “to smell my glucose level” that the Dexcom G5 shows generally lower than the actual glucose level. Anyhow, I believe that this might have something to do either with body temperature or a hot shower since I usually notice it after a work-out or shower?
Otherwise it seems fairly accurate after the first 24 hours of calibrating but I would not treat a low or high without double-checking, especially if I do not have any other symptoms. Obviously we might all have the tendency to treat low warnings more vigilant than high warnings but that is when you have to know how you can trust your own warning signs.
I just look at it as a training tool that you can use to fine-tune your results. But of course, as so much other technology, it becomes quickly extremely addictive and because of that I am a bit worried that I could loose my own feel for my glucose reading as I tried to describe “that I smell my glucose level”
We used to get 12-14 days all the time. But the past school year, we have gotten about 8-9 days from many sensors, and 2-3 days from quite a few (early death), so our average these days is below a week.
Our lack of duration these days appears due to lean body type.
this is exactly the problem that i had with my dexcom. i am very very lean and had little to no body fat to adhere it to. i rarely got accurate readings and often would hit capillaries or even nerves upon insertion. i was constantly calling dexcom for replacements. finally i decided to go back to finger sticks.
now that Medicare is paying 100% for the dexcom i thought i had nothing to lose in trying out again. we’ll see what happens.
I find the more stable my blood sugar, the longer the sensors lasts. Thus, when I’m eating low-carb and have relatively stable blood sugars with few rapid rises or falls, I get an average of a month per sensor. When I’m eating a higher-carb diet and my blood sugar is rising and falling repeatedly throughout the day, I get 14-16 days typically.
I only use my Dexcom on my stomach. I’ve used it twice on my arm, but it’s more difficult to insert alone, is at much higher risk of being pulled off, and is much harder to re-tape as needed. So I much prefer my stomach where I know sensors will be safe, since I pay for CGM entirely out of pocket.
That is an interesting observation. I personally have not made that connection, but can make the case for it. i.e. the active part of the sensor is an enzyme (Glucose Oxidase) and after enough cycles (Oxidation/Reduction) the enzyme can become inactive, I will try and correlate the lifetimes with the average blood sugar in our history.
Ok, in that case I will go with the number of times we reached a benchmark and dropped back to baseline, and see if that has any discernible affect on the lifetimes over the last year or so.