“If there’s a will, there’s a way.” This statement totally describes the Diabetes Online Community (DOC) and its collective determination to find workarounds when it comes to extending the life of certain diabetes devices.

In November, I briefly wrote about my first stab at restarting my Dexcom G6, which was completely unsuccessful. So why bother going through with a second attempt at it? Two reasons: 1) I know that other T1Ds have been able to triumphantly restart the G6, and 2) I know that there are multiple methods out there that people have used in order to do so.

I wasn’t necessarily on the hunt for a method I hadn’t tried yet, but I stumbled across one when I was scrolling through my Instagram feed a few weeks ago. Shout-out to Leah (Instagram handle: @the.insulin.type) for sharing her technique, which you can view for yourself by clicking this link.

You’re probably wondering whether it worked for me, so let me cut to the chase and give you a super annoying answer: yes and no. I restarted the G6 according to Leah’s process, but received the “Sensor Error: Temporary issue. Wait up to 3 hours.” message, which resulted in graphs with sporadic gaps created by a lack of readings. That message popped up at least three or four times over the next 48 hours, before the “sensor failed” message notified me that I had to put a brand new sensor on and finally get rid of the restarted one.

Hoping for a successful restart…

…but no such luck.

All those gaps are periods of time in which I had no readings.

This means that attempt #2 went better than my first try at restarting a sensor, but it was far from the flawless restarts that I know other people have experienced.

I haven’t given up hope, though. I do think that I’ll achieve success, eventually, after some more trial-and-error. I do have my theories that might explain why this didn’t go as well as I wanted it to, and it has to do with the following factors:

• I restarted my sensor on day eight of wear
• The sensor error message was on my receiver when I began the restart process

Next time I try this method, I want to see if it makes any difference to let the sensor expire naturally on the tenth day of wear. And if that doesn’t work, I want to at least give it another shot when the sensor and receiver are communicating properly and there are no error messages causing interference.

All in all, the experiment wasn’t a total failure. I did manage to extend the sensor’s life by about six hours – it was due to expire at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on the tenth day of wear, but the sensor didn’t fail completely until about eight o’clock that night. So TECHNICALLY speaking, I got a bit more usage out of it…but then again, those six hours (and probably slightly more than that) got wiped out by those stretches of time that I was dealing with sensor errors.

As I work through more restart attempts, rest assured that I’ll post about them so hopefully someone else will learn a method that works for them, too. But remember…restart your Dexcom G6 at your own risk. It’s not guaranteed to restart or, even if it does, to be accurate.