The other night I was up late working and needed to rewind my pump and fill up a new reservoir. I knew the battery was low, but I was hoping I could just make it to the morning because I was in my office where I didn’t have any spare batteries.
While in the middle of rewinding the pump alerted me that the battery was dead and the pump needed to be restarted. Once I restarted, I tried to rewind the pump again, but I could tell that it already finished rewinding.
I attempted to rewind and it would get another area and need to be restarted.
This just kept happening over and over and over.
At that time, I knew the pump was having some sort of motor issue and was done.
This was at about 1:45 AM.
The back up plan was needed.
Luckily, I always try and keep some form of long-acting insulin at home. I usually get this from my endo as samples that haven’t been used and she needs to get rid of.
I took a lower dose of what I would normally take for basal insulin because I knew I had a lot of insulin on board at the time.
First thing in the morning, I called Medtronic and went through the troubleshooting and determined that indeed the pump was not going to work. Since the pump is under warranty a new one would be sent out to me overnight and I would receive it by noon the next day. That’s almost a 24 hour turnaround time.
Pretty amazing.
The point of the story here is that we all must have a backup plan if using an insulin pump.
Do you have one?
Do you have any long-acting insulin? Do you have your pump settings saved? Do you know how much basal insulin you need?
If you don’t have a plan yet, then I highly recommend speaking with your doctor or healthcare professional in order to create an insulin pump failure backup plan.
As I was finishing this up, I heard the horn.
There was the big brown truck with my replacement pump.
Time to get connected again.
Here’s a link to the first unboxing of the MiniMed 630G, this should bring back memories.
I love Medtronic overnight service. The differences is I would not have waited. I call immediately when the pump fails. They always take care of things almost immediately, not if they could just make an unbreakable device.