My kids are driving me crazy
“It all sounds so simple in the manual that came with your CGM. You calibrate your CGM the same way you feed squirrels in the park. Or maybe it’s ducks you are supposed to feed. I don’t know, I don’t spend much time in parks. The manuals tells us that all we need to do is enter a fingerstick reading into the monitor every now and then and press a couple of buttons to keep our sensor on course.
True. But not true. Because the devil is in the details.”
--Beyond Fingersticks
Fat Dex is always reading slightly lower than little Nano. Skinny Dex is always slightly higher than little Nano. But little Nano is being used to calibrate both girls, so what’s up with that? I’m not convinced that the Nano is as accurate as my iBG Star, but I don’t really have any evidence for that. Some of it may be I’m just feeling sorry for myself that I can’t use the iBG Star any more… so I might be focusing too much ire on the poor Nano.
But even if it is inaccurate, so long as it’s consistently inaccurate, the CGMs should track closer to each other. Right?
Now, I’ve noticed on a couple of startup cals, where I need to do two fingersticks, that the two Nano readings were quite a bit more off than they should be from each other. Bad luck or bad meter?
So I’ve resolved to do dual fingersticks on the Nano for a while, at least for every calibration stick, just to be sure the Dexs are getting the best possible guidance in their travels through the jungle of my blood sugar.
Stay tuned.
posted by Wil | 7:00 AM
2 Comments:
No matter what meter I use I sometimes get significant differences between the two fingersticks. But unfortunately they're always within the 20% error allowance of BG meters or 15% with some of the new meters. I also wonder that if you use separate hands, is there sometimes a measurable difference between the BG on one hand versus the other? And of course sometimes the two readings are within a point of each other. I occasionally test a third or fourth time to get two good numbers to use. Some people just average the two numbers and put that number in twice.
I don't think meter companies, doctors, pump and CGM companies realize how huge these 15-20% differences can be when you are basing calibrations or treatment decisions on them.
I ran both on my 3 year old, and got the same results. "Ipod" or "skinny" dex was always 20 points higher than our omnipod freestyle meter, "fat" dex was always 20 points lower.
However, that's when it was working. The first two days on skinny dex were way off, and two days after that I would still get one reading a day that was 50+ points off. I talked to my dex trainer today, and she was going to talk to tech support for me, but I have a feeling new dex needs more calibrations the first 1-2 days to get going properly. Still experimenting.
Post a Comment
<< Home