To sensor or not to sensor?

I am lucy enough to have a CGM (continuous glucose monitor). I have the Dexcom 7 and I am very happy to have it as a tool for my Diabetes management. It can be pretty handy, but, I believe that it is not worth fighting the insurance company for in all cases. At least not yet.

While I do find my sensor helpful, it can be more of a hindrance than it is worth.

Helpful times:

• When your blood sugar is pretty stable, if it is moving up or down slowly it can be pretty accurate
• if all you want is to see the arrow of the direction your blood sugar is going (up, down, stable) and not exactly the actual number
• When you have had a sensor site in a for few days and you are very busy. It has acclimated by this point and its nice to just have to look down an check
• When driving a long distance, again maybe the number isn't dead on, but at least you can see if you should have a snack soon
• When you are sleeping (it has caught many low blood sugars in my sleep before I would have caught them naturally and the alarm wakes me up.)

Not so helpful times:

• When you're having one of those days where your blood sugars are crazy erratic, it can be as much as 100+ points off
• When your out of range of the reicever
• When you are anywhere near being dehydrated
• It has times where the reading is "???" and there is nothing you can do about it but hope it snaps out of it on its own
• you should never, treat a blood sugar based off the sensor reading. (In other words, it does not really help with cutting down on finger pricking)

A couple things I have learned:

• It does hurt a little more than putting in a pump site, but it becomes unnoticeable
• set the "high" and "low" alerts different than what you would really be concerned with. for example I have mine alarm when I am 100 for lows, in reality I'm normally about 80-90. 

Hopefully, soon, the kinks will be a little more worked out the readings will be more accurate. It is a nice tool to have sometimes but it isn't always a tool worth using. If anything sometimes I feel that it causes me to check my blood sugars more often because I see a number on it that I don't believe enough to treat without my regular glucometer  backing it up.