Dexcom’s Irritating <55 Alarm

It pains me to vent about the amazing Dexcom, but I have a frustration. It’s the must-always-be-turned-on <55 alarm that Dexcom has built in.

For starters, I love Dexcom. I hate life without Dexcom. When I’ve run out of sensors, as rare as it is, I don’t really know what to do. So all kudos to Dexcom for making my life so much better.

But Dexcom has an alarm that must always be active (no option to turn it off), which sounds whenever it gets a reading that your blood sugar is below 55. Now in theory that’s a reasonable thing to do; people should know when their blood sugar is below 55. But often when I sleep, Dexcom gets these spotty readings. Sometimes it gets one quick data point that I’m at 35 when I’m really at 220. Sometimes it thinks I’m at 40 when I’m really at 100. It only happens when I sleep, but it happens once or twice a week.

Now this actually doesn’t impact me much, as I sleep through anything, even Dexcom telling me I’m dying.  But for my partner it’s a serious issue, because it wakes her up every time. Now if this only happened when I was really at 45, that would be great. She would wake up, then wake me up, I would get some juice, and it would be a powerful feature.

As it is, it wakes her up a couple times a week, with the bad news that I’m below 55 when I’m actually at 150. At first it was ok, but it’s happened so much that my girlfriend and my favorite medical device are having a hard time getting along. I think I will just leave Dexcom in another room at night, where it will leave us in peace.

So Dexcom engineers… if you’re out there… any chance you could make it possible for us to turn off that <55 alarm? We're big kids, I think we can handle the choice, at least until you get rid of the random LOW readings when I'm sleeping.

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Sam Gellman

After growing up in Wisconsin, Sam Gellman spent his junior year of high school in the Netherlands, about half way through the year he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He finished his year abroad, learning the ins and outs of diabetes in a combination of Dutch and English, which is now the Dutch vocabulary he remembers best. Sam spent his college years at Stanford, playing for the Stanford squash team during the year and leading bike trips in Canada in the summers. He spent six months of college in Chile, worked in Tahoe, and then got a job in finance in San Francisco, before moving with his job to Hong Kong in 2006. Now 29 and in his fifth year in Hong Kong, he spends his free time trying to learn Chinese and taking pictures.

Sam Gellman

After growing up in Wisconsin, Sam Gellman spent his junior year of high school in the Netherlands, about half way through the year he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He finished his year abroad, learning the ins and outs of diabetes in a combination of Dutch and English, which is now the Dutch vocabulary he remembers best. Sam spent his college years at Stanford, playing for the Stanford squash team during the year and leading bike trips in Canada in the summers. He spent six months of college in Chile, worked in Tahoe, and then got a job in finance in San Francisco, before moving with his job to Hong Kong in 2006. Now 29 and in his fifth year in Hong Kong, he spends his free time trying to learn Chinese and taking pictures.