u/ProfessionalBelt8433

I’m nearing my endovascular Embolization procedure (T9) and could use some advice from people who have gone through it, or decided not to have the procedure.

I’m worried at the thought of trading a pain I have learned to manage for something that could be unbearably worse. I understand that rebound headaches are common and people experience a pain belt around the Embolization location. My leak pain started at a constant 9 around a year ago. It’s gotten much better over time and the pain has significantly reduced. The pain is still lingering in the background and when I get coughing fits the pain significantly increases. It’s a cascading quick downhill any time I get sick, but otherwise have for the most part been able to manage my symptoms (sort of) with low pain.

Any insight is appreciated into people’s experiences post procedure, or if anyone has opted not to get the procedure, how they are fairing. Has anyone’s symptoms improved over time, procedure or no procedure?

Please correct me if there are CGM features I am not aware of since I am a bit new to the app but I would love to see some more correlations and guidance in the app for CGM users, both in the short term and long term. I know CGM has a decent focus given its prevalence in the Nutrition section but aside from that I can’t find any useful reference to CGM data. The Peak, Delta, Exposure are a bit confusing. For example, I’m not sure if 0-100 indicates a positivity scale or a Glucose mg/dL divergence range. I’m also unsure if a 0 = bad and 100 = good, and if that logic can be applied to each category Peak, Delta, and Exposure. The app convinced me to get a CGM, but it’s a new experience and not very intuitive. More guidance within the app would help. Also, I would love to see CGM data used in the following ways:

- creating actionable suggestions to address glucose spikes & drops (polling both short term and long term data)
- the use of my data to help me understand if the “rolling hills” I experience throughout the day are normal or suggestive of normal, but can correlate to unhealthy patterns (just because I’m in the normal range, still leaves a lot to wonder in maximizing my health journey - and a conversation with the AI about it to get this information isn’t a 1 for 1 replacement to seeing my data / statistics coupled with educational information to compare.
- a better understanding / finer detail to how my scores relate to the population average
- more correlations with Workout, Stress, & Recovery to my glucose levels to better understand.

Related to CGM, this app bridges a large gap between understanding a complicated medical topic, but I wish there was more insight that could be given and tracked to assist me in the process of interpreting glucose levels and health optimizations. As a pipeline dream, it would also be fascinating to know how certain foods affect my glucose in comparison to others on average. Not sure if the data sample size is large enough, but I think some really cool things could be done with this information in aggregate. Eating grapes disproportionately spikes my glucose compared to other fruit I eat or others in the data pool? Great to know, and would give me personable and actionable data - stay away from grapes to limit a spike.

Curious to get everyone’s thoughts.