My name is Clemma and I am writing about my experience with the Dexcom Seven continuous glucose monitoring system. I live in Minneapolis with my young son and my not so young husband. I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 11 years ago, when I was almost 21 years old. I started pumping 7 years ago, first with a Minimed 508, then an Animas IR1200, and now with the OmniPod. Friday, June 29 I hooked up to my newest constant companion, the one and only Comrade Dex...

Friday, July 20, 2007

Demise of sensor 2 and blog format

Sensor 2 died yesterday. It actually did pretty well up to the end, but then, as with sensor 1, it started asking for repeated calibrations. This time I attached myself to sensor 3 and waited 6 hours before starting the calibration. My pal Bernard and a few other people have suggested this approach to increase accuracy when the new sensor starts transmitting readings.

Only 9 days on sensor 2! So much for the 14 I hoped for. I will be curious to see how many days other people get out of the Dexcom 7 sensors. I know a few others who are using it now, but I think they are all still on their first sensor, or else they switched to the new one after 7 days, without waiting for the first sensor to die.

I am going to keep a chart of how long my sensors last. See the page element on the right. Hence the new blog template. When I uploaded that chart on the old template, half of it was cut off and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. This was one of the only formats that showed the whole thing. I'll try to make it more palatable later this weekend or next week. Well actually I'll get my husband to do it, because I'm very bad at that sort of thing.

I optimistically included up to 14 days in the graph, but maybe I'll be lucky if I ever get 11. Ah, well, no one said this endeavor would be cheap.

2 comments:

kath said...

How did you do your sensor life graph? I am going to start the 7 day as soon as the 3 day sensor I'm using dies and I think tracking life would be good too.

CJ said...

(Clemma's reply): I used Excel to make the graph. It takes a lot of steps. I can document them if you want. I'm sure someone out there knows how to do it with slick programming commands, but I'm a point and click person when it comes to Excel.