3 Pod alarms in 4 days - NOT a happy camper!

I guess it was inevitable - considering what other people have gone through with OP, we were "due". And while OP is good about replacing the Pods, it's the loss of insulin that annoys me the most.

I'm wondering if something is going on because when I called Insulet today, I held for 15 minutes and then left a voicemail. After 2 hours when they hadn't returned my call, I called again and actually spoke with a person. She said they were experiencing a "high call volume". That's not something I wanted to hear.

And it's not a static issue as he wipes down the pod and his clothes around the pod with a Bounce sheet a couple of times a day. It's just very, very frustrating!!

 

Us too. Two alarmed as we were doing a pod change and another one out of the blue for no reason. I'm getting an entire box replaced because I just don't trust that lot number.

 

Shannon, the pods within the box are all from different lot #'s so we can't figure it out. I asked OP why they were different and they said they have been "mixing them up". Our first was out of the blue, second was during a bolus an hour after changing the first one and third was again out of the blue.

 

I know! Our pods have been alarming about 20 minutes after a bolus which is frustrating as I'm not 100% sure the full bolus was given? We've also had pods alarm during priming. I know that you're not supposed to, but we seive the insulin out if we have a failure w/in 24 hours of starting that particular pod. It's just too painful to waste that liquid gold.

 

We just went through a spate of ones that did "pod error". I think there were 5 total in the last couple of months. Before that it had been a while.

It's not the end of the world but for my kid any pod change before the designated time seems to just be her last straw. And it's meltdown time. It's a short lived thing but poor kid. It just sends her over the edge.

 

I know. For DS it's incredibly embarassing when it happens in front of his friends. He rolls his eyes and runs into the bathroom to rip it off. I'm hoping the new pods aren't as abnoxious. Not to mention the 72 hour alerts drive me up a tree. But all in all, I wouldn't change our decision for the world!

 

Ugh. We had smooth sailing for a while, then the pods here starting playing Mission Impossible. They would just randomly start ticking like a countdown. And the very first one that did it happened while my son was in school...his backpack starting ticking like a bomb!

The boys had fun playing with the 'bombs' at home, but I hate calling in bad pods...they're cool about replacements, but it's never a quick call.

 

When we were seeing alot of pod failures last year omnipod suggested replacing our pdm and it worked. You The issue may actually be with your pdm and not the pods themselves. Also if we have a pod fail withing the first 24 hrs we always take out the insulin.

 

Here's the icing on the cake..... I JUST received a call from Insulet. It's a little past 11 pm! The guy said he was returning my call from 12 hours ago. First I asked him if he realized what time it was and he replied that he just got my voicemail message. I told him if he had checked my account he would have seen that after not hearing from them, I called back 2 hours later and actually spoke to someone on the phone. (They document all phone calls.)

What company calls a person's house at 11 pm on a Sunday night, or ANY night for that matter??!!

 

We haven't had any pod failures in a while, but when we do I don't rush to call Insulet. You can wait until regular hours. There's nothing they do anyway as far as I recall except take information and promise to ship a replacement with the next order.

Do your alarms indicate pod failure, PDM failure, or occlusion?

 

Well, considering it was the 3rd one in 4 days, I didn't think there was anything wrong with calling them this morning at 11 am. We had 2 alarms with 176 as the last 3 #'s and 1 with 064. The 064 was during a bolus. The other 2 were out of the blue.

 

You called at 11:00 AM on a Sunday about pod failures and you're complaining that they thought it important enough after getting the voice mail to call back? Perhaps they thought it was really important seeing that it was a Sunday morning call and decided to be prudent?

That was Lose/Lose for them.

 

We replaced the PDM and we're still having failures. We find that we go through periods with no failures or just a few and then we get a bunch of them going bad again. Let's just hope the new system is more reliable.

I have a kid who fights using pods at all. His last one lasted the full 3 days + 8 hours, but he still refused to put another one on, so we've been MDI'ing for the last few days. Even when we have a good run, he still hates using them now and has an aversion from all the failed pods. Argh. So, we're stuck alternating between pods and MDI. It gets really, really old.

And I rarely call into report bad pods anymore. I let them stack up and then I can't remember which pod goes with what error code. It's such a pain to call Insulet that it's not worth the bother. It makes me wonder if the failure rate is much higher than they realize, since I can't be the only one who gets too annoyed to bother calling them in much of the time.

 

Lose/lose for them? Really??!! I'm sorry, but considering we have had 3 pod failures in 4 days, I thought it was important enough to call them on a Sunday at 11 am to report it. I don't know about you, but I'm a bit concerned over a number of things -- first and foremost that we have had 3 POD FAILURES IN 4 DAYS, the fact that they are having a higher than normal call volume and the fact that they didn't take the time to check their records to see I had called back and spoken to someone before calling me at 11 pm. I think the lose/lose was for MY SON.

 

Rella, after the 3rd pod failure in 4 days, I thought it was a PDM issue as well, which is why I called Insulet today. However, the customer service rep said it wasn't the PDM (not sure how she knew that ).

My son is very private about his D, so when the pod starts screeching in front of his friends, it's embarrassing to him. This should not keep happening.

And those that think I over-reacted for calling Insulet on a Sunday don't have to see the look in my son's eyes each time the pod fails for no reason...

 

We had 3 pods go in one week, but since then smooth sailing. It doesn't make sense to send an entire box back because they do mix them up within each box. I wanted to share something that I was told, and have had to use a couple of times since then in order to figure out how much insulin she did get when a pod goes bad during a bolus. The pod delivers a unit every 40 seconds. So for the person that said it went bad 20 minutes later, you would be fine assuming that he got it all.

 

I don't see anything unusual about calling to report a pod failure on a Sunday. I'd cheerfully call MM any darn time that I needed to. It is...odd that they returned the call at 11:00 p.m. I'd expect that they'd have some guidelines about that.

I've mentioned before that we're considering paying OOP for a PDM to use when we'd otherwise have to disconnect. I don't like reading about these pod failures, though, and I really don't like the concept of "screeching" pods. Why do they have to be so loud immediately? Sure, if a quiet beep goes ignored for 10 minutes, wail away, but it's got to be embarassing for kids, like Caspi mentioned, when all of a sudden their pod just goes bezerk.

 

I've noticed they've had a higher call volume since the FDA approval of the new strips.

I call them at all hours, but I've never left a message, so I can't really comment on them calling you back, other that that it was a little late to return a call to someone for a non-emergency.

We have had 1 shipment of pods fail us, and it was the entire box, one after another failed, but that was months ago, and *knock on wood* we haven't had that happen again. They replaced the entire shipment, it was an annoying 30 pods worth of prime fail, or failing right after insertion. Drove us bonkers.

Do you only have the current shipment on hand, or do you have a few boxes of backup/separate shipment pods? I'd recommend swapping to those for a few days, just to get a break, then trying again.

I remember about this time last year, someone also talking about static electricity borking the pods out. I know I've been getting shocked a lot lately, no matter what I touch.... might be the culprit again?

Good luck!

 

That's exactly my point - you were VERY concerned and I can only assume your message reflected that so they called you back when they could because they detected your concern. Also, back in the day when I called on weekends, the support staff often called back from home and didn't have access to their support system. They even called back very late and I was glad they did because we were new and we had our first screaming pod and no idea what to do about it. I'm guessing that they were short staffed because of the long weekend and when they finally got around to the voice mail they called out of concern.

I guess one can choose to speculate differently.

 

I'm not following you on the delivery thing.

Every "click" is 0.05U and it clicks once per second when delivering so it takes 20 seconds to deliver a full unit - or so I thought.

Unless it's a complete pod communication failure the pod "thinks" it knows how much insulin it delivered and is noted in the history even if interrupted during bolus. It should be clear from the history if all the insulin was delivered but, yes, in the event of a complete failure 40 seconds per unit would be a good estimation.