We had to leave fairly early for a doctor appointment for the wife this morning. One of the drawbacks of Small Town America is you don’t necessarily have access to all the services you might find in a large city. The closest endocrinologist is two towns away and about an hour and twenty minute drive.
The whole point of the trip was so she could get educated on wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and an insulin pump. Yes, the wife is taking her first steps in becoming a full-blown cyborg.
She had a CGM several years ago, but ultimately it didn’t work out. Part of the problem was the notification levels. The darn thing went off night and day, several times an hour, indicating her blood sugar was too high. It seems that if she even so much as looked at a lettuce leaf the monitor would go off. It caused the wife to be extremely anxious all the time and stressed out. The other drawback is the wife went swimming often. The device was supposed to be waterproof so you could wear it in the shower or while swimming. The device was indeed waterproof, however, the adhesive the device used to stick to the skin was not. It kept coming undone and we’d have to replace it. We went through them faster than the doctor or insurance liked.
She also had a insulin pump a few years ago. That ended when she flew up from Texas to the summer house one year. I was following behind in the car with the dogs. Murphy’s Law kicked in and everything that could have gone wrong with it did. By the time I got back to her three days later, she’d been without insulin the whole time and was near hysterics. Once I arrived we got her insulin back under control and all went back to ‘normal’.
We got to the endocrinologist’s office and met with the educator. She had scheduled two hours for us. In that time she was going to explain how to place both the CGM and insulin pump on the wife and how to operate the devices that control them. It seems that the majority of people she deals with are tech averse and have problems understanding how to operate the apps. This requires a lot of time and patience on her part to go over everything multiple times.
Since I’m a programmer I understood the apps and how they operated the first time around. The educator found that rather refreshing. The CGM app runs on a smart phone, so I had to load it on my phone. (The wife has an old-style flip phone). The hardest part was remembering the username and password from when the wife was using the device several years ago so I could log into her account. I had to do a password reset and once that was done, everything went fine. The insulin pump has its own little device, much like a smartphone, that runs its app. That one went fairly quickly too. We were out of there in just over a hour. That gave the educator enough time for a long lunch break.
We’ve discovered one problem. The educator said the CGM and the smartphone with the app need to be within about twenty feet of each other all the time. We figured that this wouldn’t be too much of a problem as the wife and I are together most of the time. Well, it turns out we aren’t as close as we thought. She has her computer in the bedroom, while mine is in the kitchen. It seems that if I’m working on my computer and she is on hers, we are just far enough out of range that the app fusses about being out of range. I need my phone with me and I don’t want to leave it on the other side of the house. It looks like the wife may need to upgrade her phone to a smartphone.
The drawback with that plan is that she as an adversarial relationship with my phone. Maybe not adversarial as much as complex. She’ll often borrow my phone to make a call. When she hands it back to me, she has somehow opened various apps, changed settings, and generally puts my phone in a state of confusion. We aren’t sure how she does this as she is just making a phone call. I suspect she is mashing the phone against her face when she talks, and since it’s a touch-sensitive screen, she is somehow causing havoc at the same time.
Anyway, we are under way and things have worked out well so far. Within the next two weeks the two devise will work together and collect enough data on the wife’s blood sugar levels that they will dial in on how to best dispense her insulin and keep her blood sugars in check.
I wonder what deice we can install on her next?
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