So, for a long time now, when someone asks me what my insulin pump IS, I answer "It's my pancreas."
It's a one word nutshell of what my pump is to me, readily understood.
Now I need a similar name for my CGMS. See, just the other day someone asked me who I was IM-ing on it, and I said, "My pancreas."
But that's just confusing - I can't call them both my pancreas!
Any ideas?
Who in their right mind names a conference sketch:
"So Real It'll Make You Wet"
Completely tasteless, sophomoric, and inappropriate.
So who wins the award, who will make my skin crawl this year at Siggraph and probably for eternity?
None other than:
> Willi Geiger
> Mohen Leo
> Nick Rasmussen
> Industrial Light & Magic
>
> Ronald Fedkiw
> Stanford University and Industrial Light & Magic
>
> Frank Losasso
> Stanford University
Congratulations on making asses of yourselves! Good job!
(For reference, the sketch is on "How Industrial Light & Magic created multiple shots of photorealistic water for 'Poseidon,' ranging from huge long shots to extreme close-ups.")
Whatever could it be? What did I drop a bunch of money on? A car! A plasma TV! no....
A CGMS!!! Wooot!
Okay, well, it is exciting to me. I am one of the first users of the new Continuous Blood Glucose Monitor (CGMS) made by Dexcom.
It has a wireless transmitter that plugs into a subcutaneous 'needle'. The combination of the transmitter & sensor is about the size of an insulin pump infusion set. Okay, it's slightly bigger, but still OH SO MUCH smaller than the Minimed transmitter.
After inserting the sensor (I think it's like 4-5 mm, a thin flexible wire), the device has a 2-3 hr calibration period. Then... heaven. It gives out reading every five minutes, and graphs the last 1, 3, or 9 hours.
The receiver is too large. But, at the same time, it is so important to see the 'trend' graph of your blood sugars, so I can understand the engineer's rationale in the size of the screen.... but still. I have good eyes (for now!), I could read a much smaller display.
Back to the actual data. The first 24 hours, the device is pretty far off from your actual numbers. It is calibrated by traditional fingersticks at least every 12 hours - but accuracy improves with more testing. The first few days the sensor was at most 50 pts off. This sound alarming, but I also did two fingersticks within 1 minute of each other, and those two traditional blood glucose measurements were off by 40 pts.
After those first few days, the numbers were extremely accurate - like within 10 pts of a fingerstick. Insurance doesn't cover it, but I think its worth it.
In my first four days, my blood sugar was never over 250 (post meal spikes), but hit quite a few lows, none of which did I feel! So in that respect alone... detecting lows... this will be cool. It's nice to look at the screen when you are 100 and say, "Wow, I haven't dropped/risen in 2 hours, I feel completely safe to [ drive | sleep ]."
I have another a1c in a month.... hopefully this will reign me in, wish me luck!