My view

New Transmitter Arrived

Well I have nothing bad to say about Minimed - I had a new transmitter to my door in under 3 days. That is not bad - considering I live in Nova Scotia and the transmitter was sent out frorm California!! Seems to be working well - but I must have a sensor that is "on the line" - meaning in the right place...but JUST - my isig values are low, and often dip below 1 and then I get "sensor error"- when this happens I just let the pump go for a bit - and I find the sensor catches up. For the first time ever I had a sensor error from sleeping on the site...or so that seems to be the reason. I had to get out of bed early - the alarm on the pump was waking me up!! I will admit, it is hard enough to sleep after a nice shift...add a beeping / vibrating pump HA!

Like the Olden days.....

Oh my - after having the CGMS for only a month or so - being without it seems like such a hardship!!! Hard to believe - I could not imangine going back to manual injections as well! Hard to believe the changes in therapy over my 22 years as a person with diabetes!!! Oh well - the new transmitter will be here Thursday - and I have been working for the past two days so I am keeping busy with the long hours!!!

I have started a french class - it is great .... but someone asked me what my pump was - and I was supossed to answer in FRENCH what my insulin pump was!! To say the least it was my homework to figure out how to say insulin pump. It will not be hard to figure out (google....I know, that is cheating...).

I added the OC logo on my blog - so I hope lots of people find this blog and find it useful!!! I am learning...and reading lots and LOVE THE BLOGS!! Right on!

Cheers

Transmitter Died....

My transmitter died!!!

Over the past week it has been increasingly difficult to keep my sensors working!! Many strange errors - and the pump was alarming all last evening while I was out with friends....always nice...beep beep beep......beep beep beep.....beep beep beep....

Anyways - finally this morning the sensor was reading my glucose at 13.4, and my meter was reading 4.6 I double checked with another meter....so I called the help line - I did not want another sleepless night of my pump telling me my reading was "high" when I was actually fine!!!

The people at the helpline were great, as usual - ran through the tests on the transmitter to find it was reading out of range. SOOO a new transmitter is being sent to me and I will be up and running again on Thursday. OH MY to go back to manual testing HAHA!!

Argh annoying!!!

So I decide to go away for the night tonight........enroute in the car had a random "Bad Sensor" error. Unknown why - and I certainly did not pack a spare sensor. Not sure why this happened - and my sensor was then rendered uselsss after 1.5 days!! I called Minimed technical support...no ideas.....bad sensor - but I had already established that!!!!

Frustrating....maybe not so if I had medical coverage :)

It worked....

WOW!! I uploaded all the graphs for a two week period to my laptop - and took them to sort through while at work. So I had internet explorer open with the windows XP - saved the graphs and summaries as .pdf files and then opened them over on the main MAC OSX platform. Slick!!!

I enjoy the graphs - but it is hard with my lifestyle. I work shift work - so it is hard to say I have a trend a certain time of the day - for 4 of eights days I am working, two days and then two nights - and then 4 days off. So there is no M - F trends. That makes it hard - so I am going to look at it all as an 8 days cycle, and then break it down to the 4 work days versus the 4 rest days (well not really rest HAHA!!!)

I got 7 days out of my last sensor. I had a bath...lots of bubbles and jets - and had a "weak signal" error that eventualy led to LOST SENSOR. I waited several hours and tried several times, and never got the sensor back. I changed it this morning.....

I am off to sleep now...tired....cheers.

For $100 Carelink worked on my Macbook

Several weeks ago l I was told Carelink would not work on my Macbook, by Minimed technical support. eI WOULD NOT ACCEPT THIS ANSWER. There was no way such an obstacle existed, soley because I choose to use a mac computer. I did tried on my mac - to see why this web-based program would not work on a mac computer. Well...seems the carelink program needs Internet explorer 5.5 or later. Mac stopped supporting Internet Explorer at 5.2 and support only its Safari software for web....no go.

I searched out and bought windows XP on eBay - so because I use a mac computer I had to buy this software in attempt to get this carelink program working. Well rest assure everyone - this is a fix that works if you use the intel based macbook. eBay was the cheapest option for Windows XP - and I used bootcamp to install.

I uploaded from my two meters last night, and my pump. I was overwheled initially by the number of graphs and logs available. Seemed at first to be too many - but I am sure they will all have a purpose. It will take me a few evenings to go through them all - I will have oppertunities at work Wednesday night to go through them all...we'll see how it goes!!!

So had a good workout at the gym tonight - I do not like to go to the gym in the summer - the evenings are too nice to spend indoors - but now the weather is getting cooler, which is nice....but it is dark soon after getting out of work on my day shifts - so it is gym season again. I love the CGMS at work - I can see when I start to drop ...rather then guessing how I feel!! Again tho - I had to change my tape over the sensor when I got home from the gym..sweat underneath!? I thought the IVflex I was using was "breathable", but alas it seems not....

anyways it was a long day at work and I am tired tonight...and tomorrow morning will be another early one. I will look at the graphs tomorrow night...or the next....we'll see.....Cheers to all!