HELP!!! Heavy sleeping son going to college in the fall

You have all probably discussed this 1,000,000 times but I am going through this for the FIRST time and have very little idea of what to do! My son is going away to college in the fall and he is an extremely heavy sleeper. Most of the time NOTHING wakes him, including his pump alarm, his CGM alarm, his alarm clock or ME yelling at him!

What have the rest of you done about night times at college, especially with heavy sleepers?

I am terrified! And here are some of my questions:

Should he have room mate with Type 1 - might they help each other wake up?
Is there any other sort of support any of you have tried?
How do you feel secure that your child at college will take care of lows (and highs) at night??

I have ordered "Ruggies", a rug alarm clock you have to stand on to turn off and a bed vibrator alarm....but I'm not sure either of these will work.

My son is NOT taking on the amount of responsibility he needs to take for his own waking. I do not want to pull the plug on college away but at moments of anxiety I am tempted!!!

Diabetes mother

 

Sorry, I posted twice because the thread did not appear for a number of days. Are posts only going up once a week at this point?

 

I left a reply on your other thread.

Good luck and let us know what happens!

 

I'm right with you. My kid is leaving for the summer in about three weeks. She's proficient at sleeping through alarms and sucking down juice boxes in her sleep. I've called her 17 times to get her to wake when she's been away before. But....we're learning.

She tried the earthquake app and rejected it. Apparently the cat jumping off her loft bed or anyone walking nearby could trigger it.

The best thing she's found is that because she's been sleeping through cgm alarms since age 13 is to have her FOLLOW herself on Share with different alarm sounds. Since they're different, she wakes better. She also bought a blue-tooth speaker so that she can have the Follow volume even higher.

She had friends over a week ago, and they decided to camp out in the yard. I said I wasn't willing to walk down stairs and outside to feed juice boxes, so I turned my alarms to 50 and 250/3 hours. She woke without me on regular guard all three nights, and one of the nights was a bad one with D'oh. When she's in the house, I hear the cgm on the first buzz the vast majority of the time, and I'm not willing to lay and listen to it alarm endlessly hoping she'll wake. Diabetes robs enough sleep already. But, it's also not made her learn to wake, so I see it as a Catch-22.

Some people put their receivers in glasses to make the vibration louder.

She's told me of an alarm clock app that monitors body movement for the wakeful period of sleep rather than the deep and then alarms. Having something like that set might be helpful if the cgm alarms aren't working?

Sometimes I feel envious of parents who are worrying about whether their child has study habits down when we're terrified and worrying about them waking for lows.

 

The vibrating alarm is awesome. We have a "Shake-Awake" and you really can't ignore that earthquake! I would tackle one thing at a time. See if he can be woken up with the vibrating alarm disc that goes under the mattress. If that is successful, then I would try to find some way to get a similar effect with the CGM alerts. Can they be somehow channeled through some sort of alarm clock? Check with the manufacturer. I would also think about an apple watch use with a Dexcom G5 with a vibrate function.

Here's some additional information:Sonic Alert Traditional System USS 360 Universal Sound Transmitter

You put this next to your Dexcom. There is a sensitivity dial, which you adjust so that it picks up the Dexcom alert. And you can adjust how many beeps it takes to turn on and off. (I'd guess you'd want a single Dex beep to set it on or off).

You basically plug something into the USS360. For example, if you use a light next to your bed (make sure the light switch is turned on), you can set this to turn the light on and off every time it hears a Dex beep! Or you could plug in a radio and have it cranked all the way up. The USS360 would turn the radio on and off for every beep.

It's $54, but it has a 30 day money back guarantee if it doesn't work. And the only other thing you'd need would be a light or something to plug into this that would wake you up.

So the Dex "wakes up" the USS360, which "wakes up" your light, which wakes up you...

Here are some links:
http://www.harriscomm.com/sonic-alert-traditional-system-uss-360-universal-sound-transmitter.html3

http://www.harriscomm.com/newsletter/support/SA-USS360_manual.pdf1

You should be able to do something similar with the shake awake.