LifeAfterDx--Diabetes Uncensored

A internet journal from one of the first T1 Diabetics to use continuous glucose monitoring. Copyright 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016

My Photo
Name:
Location: New Mexico, United States

Hi! I’m William “Lee” Dubois (called either Wil or Lee, depending what part of the internet you’re on). I’m a diabetes columnist and the author of four books about diabetes that have collectively won 16 national and international book awards. (Hey, if you can’t brag about yourself on your own blog, where can you??) I have the great good fortune to pen the edgy Dear Abby-style advice column every Saturday at Diabetes Mine; write the Diabetes Simplified column for dLife; and am one of the ShareCare diabetes experts. My work also appears in Diabetic Living and Diabetes Self-Management magazines. In addition to writing, I’ve spent the last half-dozen years running the diabetes education program for a rural non-profit clinic in the mountains of New Mexico. Don’t worry, I’ll get some rest after the cure. LifeAfterDx is my personal home base, where I get to say what and how I feel about diabetes and… you know… life, free from the red pens of editors (all of whom I adore, of course!).

Friday, April 06, 2012

Road Warriors

Alternate title: more non-FDA approved fun with mySentry

Life imitates art. Or is it art imitates life? And just where the fuck does technology come in to play in all of this?

Check out this picture that Rio snapped from the back seat of the Jeep today on our way to Santa Fe to see Titanic in 3-D (which, if you’ll pardon the pun, is absolutely smashing).


Now the Cerrito, that’s Spanish for a landform that’s too small to be a mountain, outside the windshield is called Starvation Peak.

Local lore has it that either Indians in pursuit of Spanish settlers chased them up to the top and starved them out; or maybe it was the Spanish who chased the Indians to the top and held them in siege until the last one of them starved rather than surrender. I hear both versions of the story in equal numbers. It’s like our own local Masada legend. I think any sort of siege warfare strikes me as a more European approach than a Native American approach, so if I had to vote, I’d vote for the Spanish starving the Indians; but of course, most likely nobody starved nobody up on Starvation Peak.

Still, it’s a great story.

Anyway, the only reason I’m talking about this, is I want you to first look at the shape of Starvation Peak. Then look at the shape of the trace line of my sensor glucose on the Sentry monitor on our dash board.


How crazy is that?!

Oh, and by the way, Sentry preforms just fine in an automobile. And probably would in trains, planes, and boats, too. So long as ya got power. I have one those mechanical coffee cups that doesn’t hold coffee. It has a cigarette lighter car-power plug (I’ll bet you younger people didn’t even know those crazy car power plugs were originally designed to charge electric cigarette lighters that were standard equipment in all cars in my day) on one end, and a standard house-style three-prong plug on the other end. Instant house power on the road.

No Outpost required. Sentry did a fine job of picking up the signals from pump number two on my waist.

What’s it like having your blood sugar in your face all the time when you’re driving? A hell of a lot safer than having it on your waist, that’s what.


Which got my mind thinking. We’re beaming data off our pumps like Chernobyl leaks radiation. Why should mySentry have all the fun? In theory, there’s no limit to the other devices in our lives that could be engineered to receive all or part of our pump data.

Why not build receivers into our cars? That could actually lower the number of accidents from dFolk who go lights out on the freeways and byways.

Hell, why not make a heads-up display on the windshield?

And more.

Signals could be received by watches, medical alert jewelry, phones, TVs, coffee cups.

The possibilities are limitless.

Why I bet some clever engineer could even build a tiny little screen into:






Dateline: 1920 hours (that’s 7:20 p.m.) today:
Motor Error.



            

3 Comments:

Blogger MC said...

Sorry Wil, you're a few years late to claim this idea. Here's a link to a dashboard CGMS. I've been hoping this will be available by 2014 when my daughter turns 16.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9965168-1.html

Mary C.

1:07 PM  
Anonymous Kelly, dmom said...

I guess it is more important than a GPS, as long as you know where you are going.

11:32 AM  
Blogger Scott K. Johnson said...

Ok, the matching non-mountain peak and your CGM trace is crazy!

1:21 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home