I Feel Like a CGM

My initials are JPA, not CGM.  Right?  But yet, more often than not, I feel like a continuous glucose monitor.  Like anyone who lives with or has a family member with type 1 diabetes – blood glucose numbers are a regular topic of conversation. And since Mike and I both have diabetes, it’s double the numbers.  My numbers, though, don’t usually go wildly out of range (thanks, LADA).  So I’m mainly talking about Mike’s diabetes.

Take the following as an example:

In a normal home if wife asks husband, What are you?, he may be puzzled and answer any of the following: a human being, a man, your husband, a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, etc.

In this diabetes home, however, when wife asks husband the same question, the answer is usually either high or low.  Or else the response is just a number.  It’s all about the numbers these days.  Day after day it’s daytime highs followed by nighttime lows. 

For weeks (months?) I’ve been attributing Mike’s BG issues to his marathon training, with the thought that it was all temporary and everything would return to as normal as life with diabetes can be after the marathon.  The days leading up to the marathon were extra full of BG frustrations, and now here we are 8 days after the Milano City Marathon and there’s no relief.  When Mike returned from his very early morning run today the first thing he told me was that he had a terrible hypo last night.

“But you set an alarm to check,” I said.  I felt so guilty I could hardly stand it.  Usually, I hear Mike’s alarms and nudge him to check.  I had been completely exhausted last night and thanks to Mike’s mother, who invited Adam for a mid-week sleepover yesterday, I was able to sleep with the only interruption coming from the cat trying to push me off the pillow.

I hadn’t heard Mike’s alarm at all, but he told me that he heard it.

“I checked,” Mike said.  “The hypo came later.”

I’m a lousy CGM.  I did not sense his hypo at all.  And our cats are not at all like those stories of cats that wake their hypoglycemic owners.  The cats are obsessed with me.  They wouldn’t jump on Mike at night unless he began to sweat tuna.

Maybe I shouldn’t feel like it’s my responsibility to wake Mike to test his blood sugar.  But for whatever reasons, I do feel that way.  I hereby pledge to set my own alarms at night, not to depend on Mike’s.  I also pledge to harass Mike until he gets a real CGM.  It’s not covered by our insurance, and it’s a huge expense.  But you read it here first – Mike is going to get a CGM, even if it means we both take on more work to cover the costs of buying a Navigator 2 here ($2,175 + $600 a month to use).  A better option would be getting a Dexcom 4 CGM in the U.S. which, according to Diabetes Self Management costs $1,198 + $349. 

Jessica Apple

Jessica Apple grew up in Houston. She studied Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, and completed an MA in the same field at the Hebrew University. She began to write and publish short stories while a student, and has continued to write essays and fiction while raising her three sons (and many pets).

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Jessica Apple

Jessica Apple grew up in Houston. She studied Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan, and completed an MA in the same field at the Hebrew University. She began to write and publish short stories while a student, and continues to write essays and fiction while raising her three sons (and many pets). Jessica’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, The Southern Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the diabetes correspondent for The Faster Times. In 2009 she and her husband, both type 1 diabetics, founded A Sweet Life, where she serves as editor-in-chief. Jessica loves spending time with her sons, cooking with her husband, playing with her cats, reading, biking, drinking coffee, and whenever possible, taking a nap. Follow Jessica on Twitter (@jessapple)