As soon as I heard last year that you could order a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) online without a prescription, I knew I wanted to try it. There are currently two on the market, the Stelo, made by Dexcom (which I haven't tried), and the Lingo, made by Abbott Labs. A Lingo lasts for two weeks, and with my intitial order, I got two of them. I paid $89, a slight discount over ordering one for $49, and shipping was free. So I was able to monitor my glucose levels for a month. I was mainly doing this out of curiosity-- what would spike my blood sugar? what would make it fall?
But I also wondered if there was something about my blood sugar levels that was triggering or contributing to migraines. After all, I am often low-grade hungry when I have a migraine. When I'm in that state, it doesn't seem to matter how much I eat, I'm just hungry. When I mentioned this to a neurologist years ago, he said, oh, your blood sugar drops, but he didn't offer any further commentary, and I've always wondered if there might be a connection.
So after a month of wearing a Lingo CGM, here is what I learned. Keep in mind that I am not a medical professional, so this is just a layperson reporting what she observed. Take with a grain of salt. Maybe a dump truck full of salt.
- First of all, there was no obvious correlation with migraines. Maybe my blood sugar level is slightly more erratic during a migraine-- a bit more ups and downs-- but even that wasn't obvious. There was no big dip or rise in blood sugar level before or during a migraine.
- Logistics: It doesn't hurt to put it on. You apply it to the back of your upper arm, and it doesn't even "pinch" as much as getting a shot does. It has an applicator with a small needle, but the needle doesn't stay in your arm, it just inserts the filament that reads your blood sugar. There are several YouTube videos of people applying them if you want to see how it works.
With the first unit, I placed it about midway between my elbow and my shoulder, slightly toward the "outside" of my arm (if there were a clock face with 12 being straight in front of me, it was at about 2 o'clock), a location I could easily reach. Since it's sweater weather here, I didn't have to worry about it being visible under short sleeves, but you can see the outline of it if you're wearing something thin, like a cotton turtleneck. I put the second one a little higher and a little further back, which didn't seem to make any difference.
I was worried that it would catch on something or fall off, so I spent the first couple of days being extra careful--I even covered it the first time I took a shower-- but the adhesive must be really strong, because it never budged. After 3 or 4 days I quit worrying about it. It must have some kind of miracle adhesive, because even though it stayed on with no problem, it wasn't difficult to take off-- similar to pulling off a bandaid.
You download the Lingo app, and then you can connect the unit to your phone via bluetooth, which worked exactly as the instructions said it would work. Once it's connected, you get a countdown timer for an hour--which apparently is the time it takes to set itself up-- and then you can track your blood sugar in real-time until it quits working two weeks later.
So what did I learn?
- For some reason, I thought if I had something sugary, my blood sugar would spike immediately. But that didn't happen, and I tested that out several times over the four weeks (you know, in the name of medical research). Usually it would take 15-20 minutes for there to be a resulting upward trend.
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| Lingo App |
- I've read that caffeine impacts your blood sugar, and that's one of the main reasons you're supposed to get off caffeine. But every day I had my morning cup of black tea with a splash of oatmilk, and it never seemed to make any difference at all. In the screenshot, I had my tea around 7:30 and breakfast around 10--my levels are pretty steady until 10:30-ish. It would be interesting to know if coffee is different, but for tea and my metabolism, there was very little change. (In case you can’t read it, the times across the bottom of the graph are 6am, 9am, and 12pm/noon.)
- Apparently, I have a pretty healthy pancreas. In a healthy person with a normally functioning pancreas, if you eat something that causes your blood sugar to rise, your pancreas releases insulin and brings it back down. My blood sugar would rise about twenty minutes after I ate, and depending on what I had eaten, it would continue to slowly rise for about 20-30 minutes, and then it would gradually come back down. It never stayed at its high point for more than a few minutes (except once, but I confess I didn't take the greatest notes and I don't remember what I ate at that meal. But still, once out of a month isn't all that concerning to me, and even then, it only stayed high for maybe twenty minutes).
- The Lingo program told me at the end of the month that a healthy average blood sugar level for the month would be below 117 (I have no idea if that's what it tells everyone, or if it was specific to me and my situation), and mine was 110. Overall, my takeaway from this experiment is that I am pretty healthy, at least in terms of my blood sugar levels.
Which brings up the question: why do I beat myself up with guilt about how unhealthy I am? Why do any of us? I read an article in CNN this week about things to do to keep your brain healthy, and one of the things they listed was to moderate your blood sugar levels. The expert they quoted in this article said, we like to see our patients keep their average blood sugar under 105, and before I caught myself, I bit right in. Oh no, my immediate, not-quite-conscious guilt-prone self said, I am bad! I should try and get mine lower! But you know what? No. I reject that. I bet he is making a lot of money playing on people's guilt and getting them into his program so they can optimize their health. But I think I'm pretty OK with being average. 110 works for me.
In conclusion: I'm glad I did it, and I may do it again after some time to reflect. If you can afford it ($89 for the one-month supply of two monitors), it is fascinating. But I didn't notice any effect on migraines.
