[Diabetes-Talk] Wildly in accurate readings on Dexcom

[Patricia Maddix]

Hello group,
I just talked with Dexcom technical support and thought some of you might be interested in what they had to say. Over the weekend I put in a new sensor and immediately got extremely in accurate and rapidly changing numbers. The decks COM said I was 269 and rising rapidly. A fingerstick on the contour next meter said I was 154. I did a couple of more Fingersticks stickFingersticks over the next hour to see if it was changing rapidly but it was pretty steady. Then during the night it dropped rapidly and said that I was below 40 and even after treating with glucose it just stayed at that number. A fingerstick showed a blood sugar of 91. I tried to calibrate several times but could never get the sensor to read accurately. They generally say when you get blood sugars that are zooming up and down frequently on the sensor and this does not agree with fingersticks that it is probably a bad site or bad sensor so I put in a new one. After the warm-up On the second one the sensor red 120 and the fingerstick red 198. So I immediately calibrated and got it reset to a more appropriate range. I had a little more trouble with it over the next day and a half and re-calibrated. It seems to be working pretty well now. The technical support person at Dexcom said that the readings the first day sometimes can be quite off because of the trauma of the insertion and to go ahead and immediately re-calibrate to bring the sensor in line. I had previously heard that the sensors that are off the first 24 hours will eventually correct themselves and not to calibrate. So it is good to know to go ahead and calibrate right away. Otherwise I’m sticking my fingers every few minutes to know what my blood sugar really is as my blood sugars change very rapidly and I have to know for sure what to do about food or low blood sugar treatment. I cannot comfortably wait 24 hours for the sensor to correct itself. Also if I were using an insulin pump with an integrated CGM that makes decision on insulin dosing as a result of the sensor results the insulin being delivered by the pump would be horribly incorrect.
Dexcom is sending me a replacement for the first sensor that I removed after two days.
The Dexcom is just not quite there yet in terms of totally replacing fingersticks. Once the sensor seems to settle down and start giving very accurate results I feel comfortable with going several days without confirming with a fingerstick.
Patricia

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