Dealing With a Confused Insulin Pump
Yesterday morning I noticed a “battery low” alarm on the PDM (Personal Diabetes Manager) of my insulin pump (OmniPod). That’s a good feature, for sure. What’s not a good feature is having the settings get erased when you change those batteries.
When I noticed the alarm, I had just finished a bolus for breakfast. I took off the rear cover of the PDM, removed the batteries, and then put in two new AAA batteries from my supply. Normally when I do this, the PDM displays a splash screen while it starts up again. Within fifteen seconds or so, it’s back to business as usual.
This morning, however, the new batteries did nothing. I immediately suspected the batteries were inserted backwards. I checked the plus and minus ends and re-inserted. Still nothing. I wondered if I picked a pair of dead batteries from my supply, so I picked another two batteries and inserted. Within a few seconds I saw the splash screen and I thought I was back in business. Nope. Next thing I saw was an error message “PDM Error” or something like that. I clicked on the “OK” button (nothing else I could do at that point). Then it prompted me for the current date and time. It had lost it’s settings! Having to re-enter date and time is barely an inconvenience though. On the other hand, re-entering all my alarms, basal rates, carbohydrate to insulin ratios, custom temporary basal rates, custom food definitions, personal information, etc., etc., etc., now that’s a real pain.
But then something even worse happened. Due to the loss of date and time, it had decided that it could no longer communicate with the pod I was using. I still had two days of use on that pod too!
It wasn’t done yet though. After I had changed to a new pod, there was a message that it could not do bolus calculations for another two hours. Normally, I enter the amount of carbohydrate I’m going to eat and it tells me how much insulin to deliver based on my carbohydrate to insulin ratio and the amount of insulin on board (the amount of insulin previously delivered that’s still available in my body). This time, however, with the date and time change and the switch to the new pod, it didn’t know for sure how much insulin it had delivered, only that it had delivered some. I don’t know, maybe it’s really harder than I think to keep track of these three or four pieces of information, especially when you have a disposable pod involved. But, let me say this: none of my previous insulin pumps ever painted itself into a corner in such a way that a simple change of the batteries created this cascade of inconveniences.
It was all very annoying. But, in retrospect, not annoying enough to get me to switch to another insulin pump (boy, talk about an inconvenience!). The OmniPod has a some great features and conveniences. My hope is that by writing about this experience here, someone else using an OmniPod will read this and at least be aware that this situation can arise. Oh yes, it would also be nice if someone from Insulet Corporation (the makers of the OmniPod) were to see this and be sure their next product doesn’t have this “feature.”
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