Insulin Pump No Delivery Problems

I have been on a Medtronic insulin pump for a bit over 9 months now, and things have gone fairly well. Over the past week I have gotten 7 no delivery errors that are indicative of air getting in the line forming an occlusion. It is unknown that is causing it, but the main cause seems to be the infusion set getting crimped in some manner.

I pulled two out with both having a slight bend in the catheter. Both had different placement location but were the same type of set. The no delivery error has occurred four other times and I was able to rewind and try the same infusion set again. All the times my blood sugar was in the range of 300-450 at the time of error with it falling to 80-110 the next morning. This has caused me to go through 4 infusion sets in 5.5 days time. I am going to assume that it is something with my infusion set placement on the body and not the equipment itself.

The problem was resolved by replacing the line and the insulin reservoir itself. The past times it had always been the site itself. While this is only the fourth time it has happened the past three were all due to kicks in the catheter of the infusion set itself. I will be checking the reservoir every time to ensure a good fit of the cap.

The only problem that I will be having is with the State provided insurance. My wife works for The State where we get our insurance from. We have had our insurance canceled because the state only checks the mail box once every two weeks. This may seem bad, but five years ago they only checked it once a month. I mailed it on the last day possible after having problems, the post office took 8 days each way, and it looks like it got there on the last possible day for them to check the mail. And rather than check the mail in the afternoon they check it in the morning. This means that just the time the government took to work with it was 31 days.

The next thing to happen with the insurance is that when my wife went back to work they needed to process a large amount of paperwork. The insurance we had was for disability and we were paying it every month by sending a check ... no electronic payments of course it would cause people to lose jobs. You have to have someone to walk to the PO box twice a month. When she got back to work someone canceled the disability portion of the insurance system, but did not put in that the deductions from payroll needed to continue. This caused to insurance to cancel at the end of the month. They said they would get the new insurance to go through the payroll group as soon as possible.

Then we tried again to get a prescription to be paid for, but the person we talked to did not set up the paper work to go to one more person who made sure that the payroll deductions were actually made. There was three people involved in setting up a single thing. Each of them had multiple steps to do and did not do all of them causing a simple mistake on their part to extend for three months. This is why I am glad the entire country is not on State Run (Socialist) Health Care.