You are so right!
I think it is good to post this info. If the only info posted is flat lines that donât go over 140 then we will miss out on the vast majority of the D traffic that would pass this by as being unrealistic for their needs.
(ie - other people noticing these forums and trying to decide if they should stick around and become regular readers and contributors)
I assure you we are not flatlining between 80 & 140. lol. Obviously. You saw a clip of our cgm above. And that particular cgm graph snippet is not what I would consider a serious problem. It went a bit high and responded to correction. It was job well done. Similar to what both @Michel and @docslotnick alluded to, we go in the high 200âs and the 300âs quite often and sporadically. It doesnât take much. It happens - we correct. Sometimes we know what caused it and sometimes we donât.
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My assumption is the transmitter works fine but it is the Dexcom Software running on the receiving device (whether it be the Dexcom Receiver of the Dexcom G5 Mobile App) which fails to take time zones into account.
Have you worked IM into the mix yet?
We use IMs fairly often now. But we are not having 100% success on those, more like 30%. We typically use the calf, and use an 8mm needle. But about 70% of the time we donât get an acceleration. The other issue is that when it works it needs less insulin â so as you donât know ahead of time itâs a bit tricky.
As a general comment, sometimes I read where someone will say something like âI took X units and it didnât do anything. An hour later I was still 300!â
Often times those comments are not right. If they hadnât taken the X units, they might be at 400 an hour later. We really donât know what it would have been without the insulin.
As long as the insulin is not bad, and it is injected properly, it is doing something. Maybe not as fast as we would like, or as much. But is has to do something. It doesnât just go away after it is injected.
In the case of IM acceleration, again it is hard to say. If you had done it subcu instead of IM, the BG might have been even worse. So even when the IM does not appear to be working faster, it might have been much faster than if it was done subcu.
The insulin works every time, there is no choice. So it would clearly have been worse without the insulin. When we inject the right amount of insulin and we donât go down, we say that it did not work, but we donât mean that it did not have an effect â we just mean that it did not take us down as we wanted it to.
In normal non-sick circumstances (when we are not dealing with a hormone peak), we see a slight inflection around 25-30 minutes, and a sharp elbow around 45 minutes for a regular injection. If we use an IM in the calf or in the quad, exercise 3-5 minutes on it, and are successful, it is our experience that it will fully activate in 30 minutes (instead of 45) and we will need about 60-70% of the insulin we would normally use. We are successful about 30-35% of the time.
In other than normal circumstances, it is not really possible for us to know if an IM was successful (as an IM) because, in a hormone peak, things are so much more uncertain that we canât really know how much insulin is needed, and how hormones keep on flowing.
It is just me be too concerned with semantics.
But for new diabetics, it is an important distinction to learn. Something they should be aware of, and something to point out to them - the insulin did work but maybe you needed more, without taking it you would have been much higher, etc.
Thatâs why I wanted to mention it.
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