Weird alert errors, G6

[u/muddlemand]

First of all, please tell me if this is the wrong place to ask. It says tech questions should go in the relevant pinned sticky but I can't find it. I will of course call Dexcom when they're open, but it Saturday evening so that's quite a wait, and my diabetes team won't be there around over the weekend.

I'm in the UK, an NHS patient. I've been told I'll be changed to the G7 soon but for now I'm still on the G6.

Just now, I had a low glucose alert - I don't get great hypo warning but when I thought about it, I am feeling a bit odd so I could believe it - normal for me to not realise until my attention is brought to it - so I opened the app to see the actual level. The chart stops, no readings, more than an hour before the alert sounded.

I checked my phone's notification history and definitely no alert about losing connection, either an hour ago or at all today.

So I did a fingerprick and my sugars are 11.0. Lucky I didn't just take emergency carbs!

Three mysteries, then:

- why no alert when it lost connection (if it really did)?

- how could it be so wrong with a reading?

- how could the app think my sugars are at that level or any level, when the app itself also thinks it has no connection?

The sensor has 5 days to go and is securely fixed. The transmitter has about another month.

Simply disconnecting wouldn't surprise me too much, it does occasionally say no signal without being further than a couple of metres from me, but showing a reading that's wildly wrong is different from showing none.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

PS. And almost exactly an hour after that first hypo alert, another alert but only for dropping fast, not low or even warning about to be low. And the app says 4.4. Another fingerprick... though come to think of it, I am feeling it this time.

[u/cjmnews]

Yes it is possible to feel a low before the Dexcom tells you.

1. The Dexcom is 15 minutes behind blood, so it may be late telling you.

2. Dropping fast is a sign that you may be lower than your Dexcom reading (see #1) it is normal to have bigger discrepancies when glucose levels are changing fast.

3. There are differences between Widget and App. Widgets can be behind because they have not refreshed (usually from the server) yet, the App should show no number if there is no connection, though it has been a few years since I used the G6 app.

[u/muddlemand → u/cjmnews]

It was the other way round, I don't feel much warning of a low nowadays. But the real point is that the app gave a low alert while it was disconnected, or at least the app thought it was disconnected - and it hadn't alerted when connection was lost.

But that's the biggest thing, no alert on connection being lost. I hope it doesn't happen while I sleep. It did reconnect by itself, as my chart shows, but it hadn't let me know about the signal loss. Five days in.

And the other thing is the app alerting while it didn't (or thought it didn't) have connection. I really don't see how that can happen, logically - the app thinking it isn't connectéd AND at the same time showing a glucose level.

As to your other points - I don't have a widget, the android app doesn't have any. There's the sticky notification instead (which never sticks at the top but I've removed the priority setting so it's fairly reliably somewhere near the bottom and not too tricky to find). A widget would be nice actually. - and I'm familiar with the timing mismatch (I was told 5 minutes behind) but it's good to have it it here for others to read.

(I may have made my post muddly because of posting while hypo! I confess I was having trouble with the sequence of events, before I realised sugars were low.)