CGM

Ellie finally got her CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor) on Friday, March 26.

I had been on the phone with insurance and the medical supply company and the doctors office for at least 4 weeks trying to get the paperwork pushed through.  I was calling almost 2-3 times weekly to follow up on conversations.  I talked to new people almost every time I called.  The truth was it felt like the one thing I could do to make life a little easier for Ellie – and it wasn’t moving along very quickly.  It was exasperating. 

Finally, they said when I called on the 19th that it was released to the warehouse to ship.  I tried to make a training appointment with the doctor in anticipation of receiving it.  They said I needed to have it in hand before the appointment would be made.  It arrived on Tuesday, March 23, and I asked firmly, but politely, if we could have appointment by the end of the week.  We were having our Diabetes Boot Camp, so we could use this as another tool of education.  They fit us in on Friday afternoon at 1pm… an early release before Spring Break. 

What is the CGM?  This is a small device worn on the body to measure blood sugar levels continually.  It has a small tube that sits under the skin.  A transmitter affixes on top of that and sends a reading to Ellie’s phone every 5 minutes.  It is amazing.  We got the DexCom G6.  It has an applicator to put the sensor in (thing with the orange button), a transmitter to send the signal (small piece rimmed in purple), and then a receiver or your phone. It can be worn on the love handles/upper bum area, the stomach, or the back of the arm.  You wear it in one of these locations for 10 days and then change the location to give each place a break. 

    

It is an amazing piece of technology.  We don’t know the power of how to use it yet, but I can imagine it would help immensely once they teach us even more. 

Here is the thing… Ellie has very little body fat.  She is active, healthy, and growing.  Often these things are placed in places where there is body fat for two reasons: 1) to get a good reading, and 2) so it doesn’t inject and sit right in the muscle. 

We picked the stomach as our first placement site.  We thought it would be most out of the way.  Ellie had researched if it hurt; by all accounts, people said no.  Well, it does occasionally hurt.  It hurt her more at the beginning to move positions from sitting to standing to laying down to bending over.  I am not sure if it was the tube inside poking at a muscle, heightened nerve endings, the adhesive tugging at skin, or all of those things.  At any rate, it wasn’t as comfortable as we imagined it would be. 

Frankly, she is ready to be done with it.  I told her she has to give it a month.  It gets her out of constant finger pricks for blood sugar readings four times a day.  When she started doing those, she didn’t like them either.  So, I said she needed to give the DexCom the same amount of time to adjust to it.  By the time a month is over, we can try it higher on the belly, on a love handle/bum, and on the back of the arm.  Hopefully, one of these will be most comfortable. 

As the week has progressed, she has gotten more comfortable with it with less pain.  In fact, she is jumping on the trampoline, swimming, and bowling with it!  I say that’s all good. 

This is a journey and it is not an easy one.  The newness has worn off and now we are caught in our new normal – count carbs, talk about food, measure food, look at numbers, think about the next step, adjust to new things, work through pain, etc.  It is amazing to watch Ellie maneuver through all this – sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes upbeat, sometimes just Ellie.  Any and all of those emotions are good to see.  One day, I hope that this wil just all process in the back of her mind and it is a fluid navigation of the day.  We are just not there yet.