My PDM went on the fritz—internal battery failing, I reckon, based on another FUD thread—and they overnighted a new one immediately!! Hooray!!
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Hey, that’s awesome they over-nighted it to you!
I am sure you already know this CL, but something I wanted to mention for anyone who may be new to OmniPod and may not know this already…
Not sure if this applied to your situation, but whatever pod you have on will continue running its course throughout it’s life. (I mean in the case of a PDM loss or failure, not a pod failure.)
So for example if you are whitewater rafting, and your PDM gets tossed overboard and is lost, you can keep the pod on and the basal will keep going with whatever is programmed. If you have it on normal basal, it will keep doing that.
Even if you have it on a temp basal, it will let the temp run its planned course and then return to normal.
You can’t bolus, but the basal will remain as scheduled.
Just wanted to mention it for anyone who has a PDM failure. As long as your pod is not beeping, you can keep it on and know that it is still running your basal as planned.
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But be aware that if you “suspend” the basal for a period of time it will not resume at the end of that time. I made that mistake a few times while diving and had the thing beeping at me through the water but not resuming; that could have killed me if there had been an accident. The same applies to any activity where you might get stuck. My rule is to never suspend and, if you are in an environment where you might get stuck (diving, rafting, paragliding, sailing, climbing, hiking etc) you might want to drop the pod as the basal and swap back to Lantus.
Temp basals are good, because they auto-resume, and with the Dash it is possible to set a temp basal of 0, which is better if you are in the water because the unpredictable 0.05IU pulse sucks water into the pod, even if it only happens once an hour.
BTW, the PDM does have a replaceable battery; it is a really cheap smartphone:
The battery cannot be dynamically replaced, if you try the PDM will lose the clock and lock you out of various stuff for 2 hours, but then a replacement PDM requires a pod change (I think.)
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Hi John,
Yes, thank you very much for that important distinction!
A temp basal returns after the time ends - no matter what - but a suspend does not!
Extremely important to know that.
That is why, as you also described, I never do a suspend except when I have to for a basal edit or something that requires it.
A temp basal of “Off” is the better way to go.
The suspend feature is somewhat misleading, in that it gives you a time. But in reality, a 30 minute suspend is not really 30 minutes, it is indefinite. It only reminds you at 30 minutes.
Not sure why Insulet did it that way.
Thanks for bringing this up!
I would guess they did it this way so that you would check the BG before activating again. It was really annoying. The 0% (OFF) temp basal option was only introduced later with a S/W update I think.
The temp basal is also limited in another way temp basal smaller than the minimum dose was not allowed e.g. you cannot temp basal 10% of 0.2u as the minimum dose is 0.05u. So you could also not round down to 0%. For a small child this was really frustrating as the minimum 0.05 dose could be a significant portion of hourly basal. And it may not make sense for longer temp basal like 4 hours
I also never use suspend unless its required.
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