Does anyone else suffer with this or experienced the same fear ?
Hi, Charlie, I think most of us have had this at one point or another. I've had some appalling night hypos in the past which ended up with me being reluctant to go to sleep in case it happened again.
But we have to move on. It's good that you've got libre. I started using it a couple of years ago, it's made a huge difference in my approach.
There's a couple of good books on kindle which helped me a lot with getting the most out of it:
Sugar Surfing, Stephen Ponder.
Beyond Fingersticks, William Lee Dubois
They've got a lot of tips on how to read cgm/libre output and use it in ways which lets you tighten up ranges without getting into a danger zone.
The other big thing is turning libre into "proper" cgm by putting a bluetooth transmitter on top of it, so that you get hypo and hyper alerts - you can set them at any level you want, say, 5 or whatever if you're being really cautious, so your phone will ring, wake you up long before you hit hypo-land, and you can then decide whether a few biccies are needed.
It's given me a lot of comfort, just knowing that I'm going to get a heads up on a dropping level, so I can go to sleep at 5 or whatever without worrying about it too much.
There's two companies making the transmitters:
www.ambrosiasys.com and
www.miaomiao.cool
Ambrosia's blucon transmitter is about 100 quid, miaomiao's is about 150. It's a one off cost - my transmitter from Ambrosia is still running fine a year in.
If you're on android, the go to app for reading the transmitters is xDrip+, if on iPhone it's Spike, links here:
https://jamorham.github.io
https://spike-app.com
These are not officially approved apps - most HCPs and the NHS haven't even heard of them. They are open source apps built by diabetics for diabetics. Many of us use them and trust them.
As you're on libre already, I'd encourage you to have a look into them. They've given me huge peace of mind over the last year or two. I can see hypos starting to develop at about 5 or 6, because the 5 min read from the libre tells me so, and I can take small steps to head it off, sometimes a single dextro tab is enough to close it off long before it gets anywhere near 4.
You'll figure out a way of dealing with this, Charlie. Using cutting edge apps isn't cheating.
To give you an idea of what this stuff looks like, and how it keeps us safe, here's a couple of screenshot of xdrip waking me up at 4am on a wander down from 6 to 4.2, and then me taking 5g to nudge back up to 6.