Yup. Insulet will desperately be trying to get Horizon out before Tandem launches their tubeless t:Sport.
all long-lastings start within a few hours. They all peak between 4-10 hours, lasting 24-36 hours. That means for Lantus that you have even peaks every 6 hours if you do your Lantus shot at the exact same time every day. In the worst case scenario of being very punctual, you could build up an insulin peak at every 6 hours you would potentially have to fight as a hypo. In order to have a steady release down to an Omnipod micro-drip level is unachievable but using long-lastings longer and longer the closer it comes.
Again, I do not want to derail this discussion over potential side-effects of long-lastings over short-term insulins that might be proven, or not. I have my suspicions and basically refuse long-lastings with that one indisputable argument that 1 medication has lesser side-effects than 2.
Pretty highly disputable in the context of being an insulin dependent diabetic with no pump and no basal… I suspect you’d not find a doctor or CDE anywhere who’d agree with that and very few diabetics… but to each their own… I’ll let you get your discussion back on track
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trick argument: 1 medication cannot have more side-effects than 2 medications. At best only the exact same number. That is mathematically indisputable.
Then why pump at all? What a pain in the ass… could instead just inject 1/2u of humalog every 27 minutes or whatever your particular case calls for with a syringe.
Basal/ bolus is the standard of care. The pump is a technological revolution that allows the same med to also behave like a basal…
If you’d rather inject bolus as a pump backup that’s your prerogative . I personally would never leave the house without a basal backup of some sort
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@John,
it does not seem as if you are looking for advice or information.
Feel free to vent. That is part of what people can do here. But I’m not very good at helping with that. Others here provide that kind of support much better than I.
But if you want solutions, ask me. If you need advice or info on the PDM or any advice on gear or info about diabetes or insulin, ask me. If you want to learn a bunch of cool ways to do things with diabetes gear, please ask.
Just tag my name like this - @Eric - and I’ll help you out.
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I’m sorry that your vacation had complications due to your PDM failure and your iPhone failure. Based on your numbers posted, it looks like you prevailed and still managed much better bg control than lots of people can boast!
Maybe I’ve had better PDM luck than others, but I’ve had one dead lithium back up battery and I dropped one in my dog’s water bowl. I do take a spare PDM anytime I am more than a few hours from home. That’s my personal preference for ease of managing “life” that happens with life support devices. But you’ve demonstrated that you can do quite well with just a syringe if you have to!
I’ve expressed my thoughts on the implicit limitations when using medical devices in other threads. As an example:
If I’m going anywhere away from home for several days, I’m taking my Dexcom receiver as a back up and a spare PDM. I never am so limited in packing space as to not include those things. I can understand people not wanting to do that, but the more sophisticated we make our daily care, the more failure points we introduce. I think that’s just what comes with the territory. Maybe the PDMs could be more robust, or more sophisticated, or integrated with something else…but I appreciate the tubeless pods and work with it in a way that works for me.
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I was looking for advice as well as giving out a warning of preparedness even if you think that you got it all covered but not unnecessary negativity of “your fault, you should have prepared better”. The advice, help and info came from Jason99 and ClaudnDaye. Sam just stuck his head in the sand and was not capable of recognizing the single point of failure in that PDM and the non-availability or replacement possibilities. He may stuck his head in the sand of long-lastings as well and that is another argument all together. After almost 30 years, I do know a thing or 2 about insulins, side effects and how they work. And how to travel with it for often month at a time in remote locations. Any gear that has has a single point of failure is bad gear no matter what.
I had 2 PDM failures within 18 month, one did reset, the second did not. And that second PDM if you have one is definitely a good idea…
Harold, I was curious if you guys were traveling, how would you guys do backup? Do you have Loop on multiple phones and bring a backup Riley Link? Or do you just bring the PDM along as backup?
Not sure if you have already put Loop on all your phones, but that might be a good idea, in case the iPhone is lost or dies. I think you can use the developer license to put it on up to 10 devices, if I am not mistaken.
I put it on 3 phones when I was messing with it. That might be a good discussion to have for other Loopers here, at some point.
If you already have Loop on another phone, and have all the Loop settings programmed in identically, it is a much easier switch to make than rebuidling and re-configuring from scratch.
Might be worth creating a thread for that idea.
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I have loop on Liam’s and my phone. If traveling we also take the PDM as well as syringes, FlexPend and lots of test strips. Only two iPhones in the house.
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You have a spare RL too, right?
Not yet.
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I am sorry this happened to you! It sounds really frustrating. Not how you wanted to spend your vacation.
We are some of the most seat-of-the-pants people I know. We’ve made many terrible D related decisions. And we travel extensively, for long periods, with very little gear.
But we always have a Lantus pen or other basal pen on hand.
Every year I make sure we have a supply of basal insulin pens filled at the pharmacy and we just pop one into the suitcase for a backup and we replace it somewhat regularly. Never needed to use it.
Both the endocrinologist, the insurance company and the pharmacist understand and agree we need a type of basal insulin and a box of syringes or pen tips on hand at all times. (Just has this discussion with all three last week actually.)
Also, to me, “failure” could also look like getting mugged, having your gear stolen in a less dramatic fashion, leaving your PDM/bag/whatever on a seat and walking off, having it slip out of your pocket and not getting it back for three months, or dropping it into a toilet or swimming pool rendering it useless. Even though those circumstances would clearly be user error, you’ll still need basal as a backup.
And I’d say the same about basal insulin. Have a backup supply separate if traveling. And if it takes two days to work, less stress than zero insulin after a couple of days.
I know I’m rehashing, but if anyone happens to stumble across this thread in the future I’d like it to be clear to them: carry spare insulin, both long and short acting.
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Mine is yours, overnighted if you ever need it.
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Responding more to people who haven’t done a long trip with the Omnipod than the OP, just my experience.
Well, I left my backpack on the hotel shuttle bus from Heathrow once. Fortunately the guys there found it and returned it to me. I had my backpack stolen from my Bronco on the east coast of Lake Tahoe once. That was actually more serious since I didn’t know how to contact the thieves and ask for it back. Probably a good thing; I and my wife would probably be doing time now otherwise. In the Tahoe incident I went to a pharmacy and explained, I got the appropriate insulins (no prescription of course). I was almost about to do that in the UK when the hotel reception told me they had found my stash.
I always carry Lantus. I admit it isn’t necessarily in date; I hardly ever use it these days. I always used to fill the Omnipod with a Humalog Kwikpen, the reasoning (with which my doctor concurred) being that if the pod/PDM was borked I could use the Kwikpen to do boluses as required.
These days (the last couple of months) I’ve swapped to using a (Fiasp) vial to fill the Pod; it’s actually much easier, but I also have a prescription for Fiasp pens, so I just use those when I’m going somewhere. Well, maybe; I haven’t decided whether to carry the vial or just use the pens, I’m going to Taipei on Wednesday so I have to decide by then 
For the last 20 years I’ve been much more concerned about not being able to get test strips than insulin. Like, the scenario is, “Hey dude, it’s a medical emergency, I need a test strip, can I bum one of yours?” Happened to me once when I was living here. Never again; the pharmacies round here close way earlier than the ones in north Lake Tahoe and stay closed all Sunday. You would not believe how many test strips and meters I have squirreled away, there is one in ever car, one in every room almost. I still forget the damn things.
Most of the time my phone works ok, but I did spend a number of hours in the sea recently with my previous phone taking photographs and so on. The bluetooth did keep working, but the charging socket and the headset socket apparently got salted out. My new mantra is, “If it is exposed to the elements it will fail.” So I’ll use Qi chargers from now on.
Give me a phone with no buttons, no connectors, nothing. Ironically the one I got a couple of days ago actually has a physical switch that is meant to make the thing be QUIET. It does not work; the Dexcom G6 app can, somehow, make noises all the same. Duh. A switch is a switch, but not on my phone.
Anyway, I always carry a blood glucose meter, or two, and they are readily available (normally for far less money than in the US) in most places in the world where a pharmacy is accessible. Where it is not (most US wildernesses, in fact, most of the US and, indeed, Siberia), three glucose meters of at least two different brands. They don’t weigh much.
The Dexcom app won’t run on the common burners; you need a really expensive phone because the ones you can get cheap (iPhone 6S for example, a mere $128 on Amazon) are simply not available OTC anywhere.
You don’t need a prescription, even in the incredibly bureaucratic US you do not need a prescription; pharmacists are trained to know an emergency situation. Indeed, in Europe (now the UK has left the scene) pharmacists can prescribe medications, likewise in Japan, unless I was just lucky with the medication I got there for a pain in my butt (a good thing my wife speaks Japanese, sort of, but if you ever go in to the pharmacy in downtown Meguro, they are highly recommended.)
The bottom line for me is; when the power goes down out here (a regular occurrence) and the road out gets blocked (a regular occurrence) and the cell tower goes out on 8$ mountain (aka “truck killer mountain” according to the cell engineer I talked to a few years back). Then, I just need test strips, meter, humalog pens and at least one needle and something long acting because waking up every two hours to inject humalog would make me annoyed.
If it works for me here it will work for anywhere I’m likely to visit; neither Siberia nor Alaska are on my bucket list.
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