To begin with, I goofed. I keep a spreadsheet of shipments with “Date to call” for the next one, and I missed the date to call. Forgot to put it on my calendar. It was July 25 for a G7 shipment due on July 30. Came and went. Then my supplier Advanced Diabetes Supply/Northcoast Medical sent me a message saying they would ship on August 31. Ouch!!! A month late. Three sensors down.
Over the weekend I sent an email with a pdf of their shipping document showing the previous April 28 ship date. But then called of course today, Monday. At the second level up the nice woman understood the issue immediately and rescheduled my shipment for today, August 17. So I asked what we could do about the two weeks delay time since my G7 stock was going down two sensors. And to my surprise she said “Well I am able to send you one complimentary G7.” Holy smokes! Who knew!
Moral to the story–always ask, you may be pleasantly surprised. Now I’m only down one sensor. And you can bet I will put that next call on my calendar.
When I signed up with Edwards Health Care Services for my new Medicare supply at the start of April last year the first 90 day supply was 10 G7 boxes, then they sent 9 every 90 days until a couple of months ago (around April) when the option was for 1 extra.
This could simply be because there are just over 365 days in a year, so rounding that means 37 G7s a year, not 36.
When Edwards did this I saw no indication it was a freebie; I assume they billed Medicare.
I also don’t use as much as 1 G7 every ten days. It’s not because they last longer, it’s the reverse; I have G7 failures often enough that I build up my supply through Dexcom replacements. Consequently I tend to delay the re-order to more than 90 days.
Other things to do if the supplier is not so responsive… I asked my endo about the G7-15 and said I wasn’t sure as the G7-10 didn’t reliably last 10 days. He gave me two G7-15 samples and I tried both, they each started to fail after 12 days but to be sure I ran both to 15 (along with much fingersticking of course). The result of that was I got +1 month so I delayed my first order at the start of the year by almost 2 months.
Edwards also starts pestering me a month or more before the refill date. They don’t refill until that date; they just sit on the order if I do it early. Nevertheless it’s pretty hard to ignore all the “time to refill” emails. Just like Walmart and my Omnipods and insulin.