You have my notes, and people have read them.
I'm going at it a bit differently with regard to CGM. It helps me because my blood sugar fluctuates; it's called hypo-unawareness. With type 1 diabetes, your blood sugar can just plummet and go low. You have no signs or symptoms. It's very dangerous. I can be somewhere and not even recognize my husband. You need to have your blood sugar.... It's on my phone because of this transmitter that I wear. It costs me $3,000 a year, and it's not covered by extended medical insurance.
I brought some to show you and to pass around. In order to put this on, you need a needle—like this—to insert that. It has a copper wire that reads your blood sugar, which is a sensor. It has a transmitter attached to it. It's very high tech. In the notes you can see that, at any time, you know what your blood sugar level is. Then you know how much insulin to take and what to eat. It's showing on this that you want to be within the grey line, but it could go down or it could go up. Because I was panicking getting here—I left at seven in the morning from Kanata—my blood sugar went low. I could see on here that it was going down so I just drank a juice. However, if I didn't have this, I wouldn't know that it was low. I could pass out.
Not everyone with type 1 diabetes—that's 10% of the 11 million Canadians with diabetes—needs to wear a CGM. It's the 2.5% or about 275,000 Canadians who have hypo-unawareness. You need to test before you drive. You test when you wake up in the morning. If you don't have this, you set your alarm for 2 a.m. and you test, because you often go low in your sleep. What happens is then an alarm goes off.
It's a great system. It's like magic. Imagine having a diabetic child, and the parents have to keep going in to prick their finger and test because they don't know if their blood sugar is going high or low.
You prick your fingers about 42 times a week, whereas this is one needle a week. That's like 2,000 finger pricks. It hurts. Mine are calloused.
What I'm asking for is to have this covered. The key point is that the CGM system, the continuous glucose monitoring system, can prevent life-threatening emergencies. Also, it can put less financial stress on the family, less burden. It would help people with type 1 diabetes hypo-unawareness have a healthier, confident life, because you don't feel confident if you don't know what your blood sugar is.
Here's the best way I can explain it. What's your blood pressure right now? You don't know. That's what we live with. We live in fear. The reality is that we live in fear. We don't know if our blood sugar levels are high or low. This is perfect because it will show me. When I got here, it had two arrows going down. That was like “Get some juice into you quickly”, right? You like to have it nice and even, but things happen in life. Everything affects your blood sugar. I'm just saying that this would save money in the long term because of all the complications with type 1 diabetes.
You had another person listed to speak today, Michelle Sorenson. Unfortunately she wasn't well. She ended up in the hospital.
I don't know what else I can say. It saves money.
