So I inserted the last sensor on his arm--normally a pretty easy thing to do. You put the sensor on the back of his arm, sticky side down, press the button, and then it's inserted. However, this time, it began to fill up with blood.
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| This is the sensor without the transmitter inserted yet. |
I was worried it would get broken if we put the transmitter inside but at the same time, I didn't want to peel it off since it was our last sensor. If we took off his last sensor, it would mean he wouldn't get his new sensor for at least a week to ten days.
I was hoping the blood would stop on it's own, so kept the sensor on his arm and cleaned it out the best we could with an alcohol wipe. I put the transmitter in, hoping for the best. But, much to my dismay, I saw that blood had continued to seep out, this time *through* the sensor, and most likely into the transmitter.
First of all, I didn't realize a tiny hole could bleed so much . I must have hit a capillary, which can cause a lot of bleeding. Second, I was very nervous now that all this blood would defintely screw up the readings! I got online with my support group and told them what happened (which is why I took the picture--wasn't doing it for the blog!) and they assured me that as long as the blood didn't get into the sensory holes (the two dots inside the sensor where the transmitter inserts) that all would be ok. Well, I wasn't positive that the blood had gotten inside but I could only hope. We started up his receiver, entered in the information that a new sensor was in his arm, and it did it's usual warm up procedure, which was a good sign. I told Max goodnight and we all went to bed.
Next thing I knew, I got woken out of a dead sleep by Max throwing the door open, holding the reciever with it's bright backlight shining in my face and said, "I'm low!"
You have to understand something about Max. He never enters a room quietly. It doesn't matter if people are sleeping, or if it's dark and you can't see. He somehow manages to march everywhere he goes without stumbling in the dark. And when he opens a door, he doesn't just open it, he throws it open. This is all the time--night and day. And when he does remember to knock when he's reminded, he doesn't knock, he pounds. He doesn't do this on purpose, but he's stuck somewhere in his own head thinking about something and this can make every little thing he does very intense. Anyway, being woken up like this out of a dead sleep can be very startling. And irritating.
But lucky for him, his low number saved him another scolding of entering a room so loudly when everyone is sleeping. I was shocked to see it the lowest number we've ever seen--40. And yet, he was standing there wide awake and alert, not seeming to feel any effects of being that low.
Nonetheless, we took a finger stick to see what it was at, and it said he was 90. That's still not considered low, but considering that he woke up on his own to check his monitor probably means that he had dropped low at some point and his adrenaline woke him up. So I gave him a snack just in case he were to dip low in the middle of the night and bid him goodnight again.
About a half hour later, again, he stomped into my room, threw open the door and again said in usual buresque way, "I'm low!"
This time it was 54. What the heck? We did another fingerstick and it said he was 140. It was way off and I knew it was probably due to the blood seeping into the sensor. I didn't know what I could do about it though. I didn't want to turn off the alarms in the middle of the night--just in case he were to have a true low.
It happened two more times when the alarm woke Max up and then Max rudely woke me up. He was getting more and more annoyed about his Dexcom going off claiming "Urgent Low" and "Dropping Fast--action needed" which meant he was getting louder and louder with stomping in the house.
The last time it happened it was 2:00 in the morning. I seriously didn't know what to do about this. I felt bad for Max because he had barely gotten any sleep all night but I was still hesitant to take his Dexcom off completley, which is the only thing that I could do. (If you shut down a sensor in the middle of it's 10 day session, you cannot restart it unless you have a new one, which we didn't.) It again kept claiming that he was "dropping fast" and in the low 50s. We checked his sugar again with a finger stick and it was at 150, which meant it was 200 points off.
I ended up calibrating it, which is a no-no to do when it is low (it's claimed that if you calibrate when the Dexcom is low it can screw up the numbers) but I didn't know what else I could do. It was doing no good being 200 points off.
I felt bad, but I left the finger poker with Max and told him that if it went off again, to just check his blood and if it was normal, to go back to sleep.
But then I couldn't sleep because I was worried, what Max truly was low and he was dropping fast from 150? The Dexcom can catch a low long before your body can, and it's not unusual to drop from somewhere as high as 150 all the way down to the 50s and 40s. Then my imagination led me to scary images of stories that I heard of parents finding their children in the morning, in a diabetic coma and covered in vomit.
So what did I do? I stomped downstairs and threw open the door (though I was trying to be quiet, but my anxiety made me frantic) and woke Max up. Poor Max, he had just gotten back to sleep too. But I had to recheck his blood if I was going to get any sleep at all. It dropped to 120, which seemed like a big drop in a short time but I refused to let it bother me too much or else neither one of us would get any sleep. I said goodnight and went back to bed and dreamed of Max stomping in my room, thrusting his Dexcom into my face and saying, "It says I'm diabetic!"
"That's because you are diabetic," I told him sleepily. That dream slipped away and a new one came, I was holding the Dexcom handbook, trying to read the "Trouble-shooting" chapter of when your Dexcom fills up with blood. (There is no such problem in the actual handbook, though I did look. My dream was more helpful than real life.)
In the morning, I was relieved to find Max just fine but not happy to find out that his Dexcom had given up trying to revive Max and presumed him dead, thus, ending it's session with him. Yes, the Dexcom seemed to come to this conclusion, saying "cannot get reading from sensor" and just gave up on him. How morbid. And so, as I sat on hold with the Dexcom customer support to figure out what to do next, Max surprised me when he said, "It's working now." He had been sitting on the couch in a sleepy state, just watching me as I was sitting on hold forever. "What? When did that happen?" I asked. "About a half hour ago," he told me in his usual casual way.
"And I've been sitting on hold all this time?!" I hung up.
So since the Dexcom had lost contact with Max's body, it somehow now made new contact, or else was thinking it did. It was very strange to say in the least. It now said that Max was 140, which a normal number for him. We double-checked to compare it with a finger stick. Much to our surprise, the finger stick said Max was 101! So now the Dexcom was running high, while Max's blood sugar was actually a bit low. I thought it might be "catching up" after losing signal for a while, so left it alone for a bit and the next time we checked it, it was 160 and Max was 90. So now we were going in the opposite direction.
My new concern was now that the Dexcom would give a false high, which could lead to the school nurses giving Max a correction when his body didn't really need one, which could make him drop to a dangerous low. See what a mind game all this is?? You always have to think one or two steps ahead!
I ended up getting back on the phone with Dexcom customer support, who told me to take the sensor and reciver off. It had malfunctioned because of the blood, they said, and it would just continue to give us bad readings all day. They would send us a new one within the next few days.
So for now, Max is back to just fingersticks, doing it the "old fashoioned way", and I have to say that I'm surprised by how dependent we've become on the Dexcom. And wouldn't you know, Max ran low while at school. Just by dumb luck--or by the grace of God, I should say--he happened to check his blood sugar because he was going to have ice cream. He didn't even know he was low, as his body gave him no symptoms. That's the beauty of the Dexcom, to be better prepared for a low.
And so are the experiences of the type 1 diabetes, the disease with never-ending suprises with its roller coaster of real-life highs and lows. The longer we're on this ride, the more confusing it gets.
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