Mondays with Mike: We have the technology 

Today, Beth and I entered Dexcom 6. No, thermonuclear war is not imminent. Dexcom 6 is a continuous blood glucose monitor (CGM). A CGM constantly monitors Beth’s blood sugar level – now, when Beth wants to know what her blood sugar level is, she doesn’t need to prick a finger, apply blood to a test strip and wait for her little contraption to call out the reading. All she has to do is fire up her Dexcom app on her iPhone, and the app—working in conjunction with the Apple IOS built-in speech program called VoiceOver—reads the current blood sugar number out loud. (The number is displayed on the phone screen for those of us with sight privilege.)

After our Chinese lunch, Beth checked her phone–it read the number out loud, and voiced that the blood sugar is level (not rising or falling). That latter information is indicated by the arrow for us sighted people.

Not only that, the Dexcom app indicates whether the blood sugar is level, on a slow rise, or a slow decline, a fast rise, or a fast decline.

It may be something of a revelation, we’ll see. Meantime, have I mentioned lately how much type 1 diabetes sucks and how much I hate it? It sucks and I hate it deeply. At it’s best—when one has it managed very well and can avoid health issues that lack of control can bring on—it is invasive, sometimes capricious (why in hell did my sugar go low?), and burdensome.

I can tell you, it’s ruined many of my evenings, woken me up in the middle of the night, busted up plans, and scared me to death. So, it sucks for me and I hate it. Did I mention that?

But imagine what it’s like for Beth and others unlucky enough to have the genes that tell their body to kill insulin-producing cells. It sucks beyond description, that’s how much.

I say all this because as a witness, I know that technological advances can help, but they can also be mistakenly considered cures by well-meaning and wishfully thinking people.

Dexcom 6 ain’t no cure, and we shouldn’t rest until we get one. All that said, I gotta say the geek in me finds it really, really cool. You take this goofy looking applicator, press the soft pad on the bottom of the applicator onto the skin on the tummy, press a button and voila! The skin is pierced with a micro needle, the needle retracts, leaving a tiny, tiny wick under the skin to measure blood sugar. Then you slip a tiny, oblong plastic thing into the clip on the sensor. That’s the transmitter, constantly sending the reading from the sensor to the phone.

The sensor needs to be changed every 10 days, so that’s kind of a hassle. But people apparently routinely swim with these things—the sensors are waterproof (sometimes a little tape hack is required).

A representative from Dexcom met us at the Chicago Library Chinatown branch this morning and she ran Beth through the whole process with me watching. Long story short—because of liability, the rep couldn’t come to our home, and she finds that it’s often easiest to simply reserve a room at a public library.

It was a little out of the ordinary, but it gave us an excuse to have one of the better lunches in my recent memory. Ming Han, dude!

Anyway, the ability to identify upward and downward trends may be a game changer. Beth tests frequently using that talking blood glucose monitor of hers, but it can be difficult to get the blood in just the right place on the test strip without being able to see. That all can result in inaccurate results and a bunch of expensive test strips going to waste. So I do a lot of tests for her, too, using a standard glucometer and saying out loud what the number on the screen says.

So I get a front row seat to the ups and downs. Even with diligent testing, despite our best efforts we often fail to figure out just what the hell is going on with her blood sugar and especially, why.

One other kind of weird thing: I can download and app and track Beth’s blood sugar in real-time, too—if she wants me to. I think I may download it but avoid using it unless Beth explicitly asks me to for one reason or another. I mean, I don’t need help being neurotic or worrying, and Beth doesn’t need a Big Brother scold. I can only imagine the fights between parents and their diabetic teenagers.

Anyway, perhaps Dexcom 6 ushers in a new era for us. We’ll see.