LifeAfterDx--Diabetes Uncensored

A internet journal from one of the first T1 Diabetics to use continuous glucose monitoring. Copyright 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016

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Location: New Mexico, United States

Hi! I’m William “Lee” Dubois (called either Wil or Lee, depending what part of the internet you’re on). I’m a diabetes columnist and the author of four books about diabetes that have collectively won 16 national and international book awards. (Hey, if you can’t brag about yourself on your own blog, where can you??) I have the great good fortune to pen the edgy Dear Abby-style advice column every Saturday at Diabetes Mine; write the Diabetes Simplified column for dLife; and am one of the ShareCare diabetes experts. My work also appears in Diabetic Living and Diabetes Self-Management magazines. In addition to writing, I’ve spent the last half-dozen years running the diabetes education program for a rural non-profit clinic in the mountains of New Mexico. Don’t worry, I’ll get some rest after the cure. LifeAfterDx is my personal home base, where I get to say what and how I feel about diabetes and… you know… life, free from the red pens of editors (all of whom I adore, of course!).

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Small, sexy, AND smart

I guess I was having a less than optimal night’s sleep. I must have tossed and turned more than usual, hopelessly entwining myself in the sheets and blankets. ParaPump and the seashell got separated by too many layers.

By some miracle the lost sensor alarm woke me up. At three fricken a.m.

Damn. Once a sensor gets a lost status most times you can’t bring them back. There was a huge expanse of blank nothing on my graph. Well, crap.

I untied the knots in the infusion hose and pulled it free from the twisted mess of sheets and covers. I smoothed the bed out by the blue glow of my clock and settled back into the bed to sleep. I’ll probably have to put in a new sensor come morning, I groaned to myself, then my head hit the pillow and I was gone.

In the morning ParaPump and the transmitter where happily chatting to each other again, to my delight.

As I scrolled back over the night’s data I got a shock. There was no missing data. For a moment I wasn’t sure: was the tangle of sheets and lost telemetry a dream? I checked the sensor alarm history, nope. The alarm was there.

So how come no missing data? Then it hit me like a lightning bolt: the transmitter must have a memory! I don’t remember reading anything about this in the MedT manuals. Maybe it was there and I missed it. This is a feature worth bragging about.

If you lose communication for a time, you have not lost your data. I guess the transmitter holds on to all those little data packets in its pockets until the next time it phones home. How very cool, but where on earth does it store them in that little tiny shell? Amazing stuff. Further proof that MedT stole the technology from aliens. ;-)

2 Comments:

Blogger Bernard said...

Wil

I saw a demo of the Minimed CGMS system some time ago. As far as I recall, if the connection is lost up to 30 minutes of data is held in the transmitter. And when you reconnect it's sent to the receiving end.

I think the most recent 30 minutes is kept. So if you were disconnected from 8:10 PM until 9:00 PM, you'd only get the data from 8:30 PM until 9 PM.

8:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't get ours to do that, if we lose the data, when I 'reconnect' do I hit "find lost sensor" or "reconnect sensor" to get the last 30 mins transmitted?

7:06 AM  

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