I am not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes. In fact, there are many times that I wonder how I have managed to get to this stage of my life without doing some permanent damage, or embarrassing myself so monumentally that I could never leave the house again without wearing a disguise.

But even though I am sometimes a sandwich short of a picnic, I am still able to decipher between high and low blood glucose levels and understand what constitutes in range, below range, above range, stratospherically-above-range-so-do-something-now and about-to-plummet-to-new-depths-if-you-don’t-mainline-glucose (the last two are highly technical terms).

Yesterday morning, I woke up with a start and within 2.1 milliseconds, realised I was low. Really low. I reached over to my bedside table and scanned the Libre reader across my arm to this:

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There is some really useful information on that screen. The large font-size numbers confirmed my ‘I.Am.Low’ predicament. The graph is also useful (perhaps not while my glucose is sitting at 2.3mmol/l, but later on I was able to look at it and try to work out the reason for the rapid drop from 1am). The red line below my target range is also useful because it shows how long I had been floating around there before I woke.

The piece of not so useful information is the alert in the top left hand corner. A warning sign with the words ‘Low Glucose’

This is not only on the Libre. If I try to bolus on my Animas pump when my BGL is above range, the delivery steps are interrupted so that I can be told that I am high. I know, Sir Pump-a-lot. That’s why I am pressing buttons. I need you to do your thing and give me some insulin. It makes absolutely no sense to halt the process right now to remind me I am high.


I know I sound like I am whinging for the sake of it. I could just ignore the messages and focus on the fact that this great tech is helping me manage my diabetes is a really useful way.

But the problem with these little messages is that they are a constant reminder of how frequently I am out of range. It’s not enough just to see the out of target number, but my devices then do a little ‘ner ner ni ner ner’ song and dance about it too.

It makes me feel that a lot of time I am messing up and failing – because a lot of the time my numbers are not where they need to be. The last thing I need is to feel that my bloody diabetes tech is judging me. There is already enough of that in diabetes.