@toddex welcome - fantastic you actually created dextape if I read correctly - you should consider one with a detachable cover for the transmitter I would love one of those for putting on when you take a bath or go swimming !!
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Hello,
Iāll introduce myself once I get this question sorted out as I want to change my user name before I introduce myself. (I tried to change my user name and it said my previous threads would be broken if I changed my user name.)
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Send me a PM with your new username and Iāll fix your posts.
Thanks!
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I joined this forum today. What brought me here is that I was looking for some help getting xDrip to work with my Samsung phone. Thanks to the help of this community, my problem was solved almost immediately. Cheers!
Iāve been a type 1 diabetic for over 30 years - I got diabetes my junior year in college. The disease sucks, but I havenāt let it keep me from doing the things I love. Iāve travelled to extremely remote places, summited Mt Shasta and Mt Rainier last summer and done grueling 12-hour mountain bike races.
I use Omnipods, the Dexcom G5 and now Iām pairing it with xDrip. (I might switch back to the Dexcom receiver and the Dexcom Mobile app. Iām testing to see which set-up I prefer.)
I live in the Bay Area with my wife and daughter. (My son is a sophomore in college.)
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I see that a lot of folks include their A1Cs. Mine has been between 6.3-6.8 for probably more than a decade. I canāt even remember when itās been out of that range. The most common numbers are 6.5 and 6.6.
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Woot! Thatās great news! Kinda record time! Welcome! My partner will soon be starting with the OmniPod and I look forward to hearing about how thatās worked for you. Lots of folks have your setup, so thatās cool.
Also, hello to @toddex! Iām glad that T1D hasnāt held you back either. 
If I ever manage to get it together I want to order some DexTape to see if it makes @EricHās CGM data more accurate somehow.
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Thatās awesome, Jonathan! We here all believe in being unlimited, and my son would love to read more about your travels and races! These stories truly inspire him.
We live in Wisconsin, but still have a house in East Bay that we hope to come back to some day. My older son is also a sophomore in college, very close to you I am guessing, as he is going to school in Palo Alto. My younger son, now 12, was diagnosed a bit over 1.5 years ago.
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@jonathan Iām about 20 years older than you, but we both got diagnosed at about the same age!
So glad to see that youāve been unlimited! Yours is an attitude for sure fire success.
If you get into xDrip+ I would bet you never go back to the Dexcom App! I use my watch as the collector (receiver) and it is just too convenient.
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I live in the Eastern USA and go by bkh online (still resisting becoming the product; still trying to hide from the data aggregators; still donāt even have a smartphone). In the past I was at the fine community on insulinpumpforums.com, but they suddenly vanished from the web and Iāve been looking for a new home. Maybe FU is it.
I recognized that I had sudden-onset diabetes in 2003 at age 52 (with no family history of diabetes anywhere), watched it for a week because I was enjoying losing 1 pound a day without trying, then went to a clinic where they diagnosed me as type 2. But I had Hashimotoās Thyroiditis a decade earlier, so I went to an endo who found several high antibodies and correctly diagnosed me as type 1. Concidentally, another guy down the hall from me at work had gotten adult-onset Type 1 a few years earlier. I had a technical career in which I had spent a couple decades looking at data and graphs, so I found it easy to do MDI and measure about 8 times per day and get my A1Cās into the upper 5ās. But too many lows, especially at night. I never actually passed out, but there was one time my wife found me sitting stupid at the table with a bottle of glucose tablets in my hand and I couldnāt remember how to chew, so she gave me Glucagon and set a timer for 15 minutes at which point she would have called 911. That experience quickly led me to get the Medtronic guardian CGM (in 2010). I struggled to develop exquisitely careful calibration technique to try to get somewhat reasonable data from that horrible horrible instrument. Despite the warnings, started using it for treatment decisions. It mostly worked fine, because if a CGM error led me to take too much insulin, the CGM would see the falling trend, and alert me, and Iād fix it. Similarly, if I didnāt take enough insulin, the rising trend would cross the upper alert threshold and so Iād fix it. No problem. Except for the times when the CGM would assure me that everythingās fine and has been for hours, but Iād decide something isnāt quite right, and take a measurement that says Iām actually at 38 mg/dL. Sheesh. When the Guardian receiver failed out of warranty I decided to start pumping with the Medtronic Revel 723, including the CGM. With the pump I finally was able to fix the dawn phenomenon without going low all day long from too much daytime basal. In 2013 I heard good things about Dexcom CGM and made the switch. Much better. The key advantage of the Dex was that it was trustworthy. Unlike the Medtronic CGM, it never led me to make badly wrong treatment decisions. The other good thing about the Dex is that it continued to work just fine even if 12 hours had passed without a calibration: the Medtronic CGM SHUTs OFF if it doesnāt get a calibration within 12 hours. In 2015 I switched to the t:slim pump because I could see it without reading glasses, whereas with the tiny screen on the Medtronic 723 there were too many times I was taking boluses and corrections by sense of touch, without actually being able to read what the pump said it was going to do to me. The t:slim takes too many button presses to accomplish anything, but on balance I like it much better. Iāve been waiting patiently for the AP features for the t:slim+Dex, but it looks like thatās still about a year and a half away. So Iām just starting to wonder if I should revert to the 723 with openAPS or Loop.
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I understand. No smartphone either.
We also are waiting on the Tandem/Dexcom Hybrid Closed Loop (HCL) although this is now pushed back to first half of 2019.
Fingers crossed and hoping the launch goal of Summer of 2018 is able to stay mostly on track for the Predictive Low Glucose Suspend (PLGS).
Welcome to FUD @bkh! Great A1C! We also use the Dex G5 for our son (3 yo - 1.5 years since diagnosis now) and it has been our saving grace. Before it, we (I) didnāt sleep nearly ever at nights afraid my son was dying in his sleepā¦during those days I must have pricked his finger every 30 minutes. Now days I wake up to alarms or when Iām headed to relieve myself. See the numberā¦correct one way or another if necessary, then go to sleep.
We are so thankful for the CGM (and the pump - but if we had to choose only one, we would take the CGM any day.)
Again, welcome! Looking forward to learning from you a lot in the future!
Welcome aboard bkh. Youāll like it here. We have a lot of fun.
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@bkh Welcome! (again). Glad you found an endo to give you a proper diagnosis when you needed it.
I am a big Dexcom proponent. It has literally saved my life. I just about had my own private bed at the local emergency room until getting the Dexcom STS3 right when it came out in April 2006. And Iāve been using it every day since. Those early Dexcom days taught me what you seemed to grasp intuitively, that the trend is the key piece of information, not the number.
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Hi bkh welcome. I also started with Minimed CGM, using Sof-sensor in 2007. I switched to Dexcom Seven in 2010, and never regretted it. But I give thanks to the problems I had with Sof-sensor because it led me to search for help and found the forums and learned so much more.
I currently use MM 523 with dexcom, and looking into OpenAPS. Note that only older versions of 523, 522,723,722 MM pumps will work with OpenAPS.
Same here. Dexcom is pushing āCGM Firstā based on a recent paper that shows CGM helps those on MDI as much as it helps pumpers.
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I vaguely recall that my MM 723 has firmware 2.4a, so Iām ok there, assuming the pump still boots up after being on the shelf for so long.
Early on with MDI and 8 fingersticks per day, I saw that to give any kind of reasonable correction or meal bolus, I needed to know (a) what my current number is, (b) where it was headed based on previous eating, exercise, stress and so on, (c) how fast, and (d) is it accelerating or slowing down. Although I agree that the trend is really useful, to me the number might be the most important, because my basic strategy is to keep pushing the number towards 100 mg/dL. The trend just tells me how hard to push.
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Youāre going to get along very well here bkh
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Thanks. My only misgiving is whether this is merely a happy club of sugar surfers, flatliners, and Not Waiting folks who have things pretty well figured out. So far Iām not seeing a lot of postings that interactively pass it on to an individual who is earlier in the process. Maybe this place is too intimidating for lurking non-experts, so they donāt feel comfortable asking for help. Or maybe this site is just too new to have attracted that kind of traffic.
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Well when we were starting out we were kind of specifically seeking out people who seemed to āhave it figured outā so we ended up with a significant bias toward the tightly controlled etc end of the spectrum but as we grow we are focusing more on being able to pass along the knowledge base weāve been accumulating hereā¦
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