This has been an incredible 24 hours. Well, maybe a little more than 24 hours. Last night at dinner my Medtronic pump starting making that bad beeping noise (any Medtronic user knows the difference between a normal beep, and those bad news beeps). I thought maybe I hit a button or something. Nope, “Button Error”. I felt like Michael Bolton in Office Space (PC load letter, F*ck does that mean?”) I was freaking out. I normally don’t freak out about things, but last night this scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know what I was going to do, I have no back up supplies. No syringes, no Lantus, no insulin pens, #screwed!
Amanda saw the concern on my face so I let her know what was going on. Fortunately, I was able to get about 1.5 – 2.5 units of insulin each time I bolused before the pump would make the error. Since I was eating pasta, I had to do this about 10 times, (4:1 ration, 100 carbs = 25.0 units). Wow, good to see that I can still do math. After I bolused enough to cover my food, I decided not to eat anything else the rest of the night, just in case. The pump did not make any more noises the rest of the night because I didn’t bolus at all.
I called Medtronic first thing in the morning, explained what happened. “No problem, we’ll get another one overnighted to you” As simple as that. The customer service rep was awesome. He asked me a bunch of questions to make sure that the pump went to he best address since it was going to be overnighted to me. He asked me if I had the Carelink USB device and I explained to him what happened. I tossed 3-4 of them away when I moved because they weren’t Mac compatible. Look who the idiot is now! “No problem about that either, we’ll get one out with you so you can easily transfer all the data over to your new pump.”
Talk about great customer service, not customer dis-service like I’ve had with others in the past.. Medtronic, I thank you. I may have said some bad things about you in the past, but I think that you have totally changed your game. I believe that 5 years ago when I first went on an insulin pump, you had no competition so you can do whatever you wanted. Now there is some good competition and a customer can change, not easily thanks to insurance, but there is still an option.
So many other things within this 24 hour period, but we will save them for another post.
Tomorrow I am going to talk about diabetes first responders.
I have had nothing but great customer service with Medtronic. A few weeks ago they had a new pump out to me in 2 hours, and it was 10 o’clock at night!
Every time I deal with them they are very helpful. Its a nice change from other customer service reps.
Typical. Those things ALWAYS happen to me just before/during/right after pasta or pizza eating. Glad MM was able to come through and get you another one so quickly! Great movie reference, by the way!!! (It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that just don’t care…”)
Is this a joke? Is medtronic paying you? I am having the same problem and I called them, I never spoke with a person just a machine it told me they would call back in an 30 mins, 45 mins passed so I called them. Same thing happened. So then I wait on the phone for an hour. My insulin pump is broken and they aren’t even attempting to get a hold of me. I guess bloggers have something magical about them.