Saturday, January 03, 2009

Pain Relief

My shoulder has been killing me for the last few days. So far stretching exercises haven't helped all that much.

No problem you say, take a pain killer. That would work except...I'm allergic to everything except acetaminophen. And that causes my Dexcom readings to go haywire.

Within 20 minutes of a dose of acetaminophen (generic form of Tylenol), the Dexcom receiver reports super high readings. Quickly up to 400 and then into HIGH. That continues for about 6 hours in my case. And there's a long list of drugs that contain acetaminophen.

This is because acetaminophen changes the reaction that is used by the sensor to measure glucose values in interstitial fluid.

Bottle of acetaminophen sitting beside my Dexcom receiver
So I take my tablets and put the receiver far away from me for 6 hours or so.

How can I tell when it's safe to use it again? I carry it around for a few minutes and see if it's still reporting off the wall values. If so, I put it away again.

It's frustrating. If I keep it with me for the duration the high values throw off the statistics reported in the Dexcom software.

I've asked them to change the software so I can mark a set of readings as invalid. I think this is a relatively small software change. That way I can continue to use the receiver and my statistics won't be affected by 6+ hours of values over 400 mg/dL.

If you're having the same problem, do please call Dexcom customer support at 1-877-Dexcom4 (1-877-339-2664) and let them know. Maybe we can influence them to make this fix.

Note: I currently own shares in Dexcom, I work not to let this influence what I say about the company or its products.

Labels: , , ,

posted by Bernard @ 8:27 AM 8 Comments Links to this post  

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Diabetes Etiquette

Etiquette is all about being polite. It's also (for me) is a hard word to spell. I need to practice writing it some more.

Have you ever sat down to eat, you're about to put a bite of food into your mouth and a colleague says "I didn't know you were allowed to eat that"? I've one specific co-worker that's probably said that to me several times in the last two months. And boy does it make me mad.
I'm planning on sending her a copy of this nice diabetes etiquette card(PDF) that's been put together by the folks at the Behavioral Diabetes Institute. The card offers 10 suggestions expressed as DOs and DON'Ts. For example
  • DON’T look so horrified when I check my blood sugars or give myself an injection.
  • DO realize and appreciate that diabetes is hard work.
  • DON’T tell me horror stories about your grandmother or other people with diabetes you have heard about.
They're all good points and they may stop you from strangling that person who just won't stop giving 'helpful' advice.

Labels: , ,

posted by Bernard @ 9:31 AM 8 Comments Links to this post  

Monday, November 05, 2007

Grrr blogger

Why does Blogger sometimes choke when publishing a blog post? I've been trying to get a simple post up on my site now for over an hour.

Blogger is updating all of the darn label index files even when I only add a few labels to the post. What a waste of time and bandwidth.

If anyone has a suggestion about how to avoid or fix this problem I'd really welcome it. Maybe it's a sign that the time has come to change to a different piece of blogging software.

Heaven help me if the rest of November is going to be like this!

Labels: ,

posted by Bernard @ 11:02 PM 6 Comments Links to this post  

   Blog Directory - Blogged