Dexcom SHARE with Bluetooth Thingy.

(This post title only includes highly technical terms and viewpoints from an analytical mind.  Also, please note that the contents of this post include opinions and feedback on the Dexcom SHARE receiver, and I have a sponsorship relationship with Dexcom.  So there’s bias involved.  Kind of a lot of bias, too, since I’ve been a fan of the company since 2006 and have been receiving support from them for years.  Read the following with that lens firmly in place.)

Last night, at 3 am, my Dexcom receiver sent up a wail.

It was the kind of middle-of-the-night low blood sugar where my brain and my body are entirely disconnected.  I heard the noise from my receiver and acknowledged it with my brain.  “Yes.  You’re low.  That’s the low alarm.  Get your ass out of bed and eat something.”  At this point, my brain must have nodded smugly, with it’s due diligence firmly in place (and brain-hands on brain-hips, if such a mental image exists).

My body?  Nope.  My body reached over, hit the buttons on the Dexcom receiver to clear the low alarm in hopes of it shutting up, and even though a jar of glucose tabs was sitting right there (foil seal removed, ready for grabbing), I rested back into the pillow, my forehead damp with sweat.

Stupid body.  Frustrated, my brain went for it again because this time, my body to switched on the lamp and pulled out my glucose meter (the meter being entirely unnecessary because I was low beyond a shadow of a doubt).  But the low fog was thick enough to keep me from following through on what should have been obvious:  EAT SOMETHING.

Thankfully, this is where the Dexcom SHARE app made a difference.  Last night, I was home with my family and not alone, but even in their presence, the regular alarms of the Dexcom weren’t loud enough to rattle anyone awake.  The Dexcom SHARE app is loud as fuck (not their official slogan) and once it started alerting through my phone, my brain and my body were jolted awake enough to actually grab the jar of glucose tabs and slug back a handful of them.

Loud matters, especially when you’re tumbling down the hypoglycemic rabbit hole.

I don’t have a lot of use for remote monitoring on a regular basis (I’ve written about this before), but it’s useful when it’s useful.  I personally do not want my friends and family having access to my numbers during the course of a normal day at home, but when I’m traveling for work, I like that my husband will receive alerts on his phone via the Dexcom SHARE app on the overnights.  This makes sense to me, as nighttime lows freak me out a bit.  I liked having the amplified alarms through my phone, especially last night, when it seemed to make a difference between treating the low and sleeping through it.

While I used the dock in the past while traveling, having Bluetooth in the Dexcom receiver so that it automagically uploads without me having to plug that sucker in an lug around the plugged-in-sucker is a definitive plus for me.  The receiver does what it’s always done – provided glucose data – but now it sends that crap up to the cloud for my family to see as needed.  (And, from what I’ve seen on Facebook, the Nightscout app will soon be able to simply scan the barcode for my Dexcom SHARE receiver and populate the cloud from there, without the need for the to-me-cumbersome Nightscout rig.  For someone like me who doesn’t use Nightscout regularly, this makes the option more appealing because it doesn’t require a whole bunch of stuff to lug around.  I’m anti-stuff-lugging.  But clearly pro-hyphen and en dash.)

When I’m on the road next week, I will be SHARE’ing my data to my team back home.  Because even though I don’t want my family peeking into my diabetes data window all the time, there are moments when it matters.  Even to a stubborn bird like me.

You might also like:

Clouding on the Road. Dexcom SHARE: First Impressions. Robot Arms. First Impressions: Dexcom SHARE.