Hi everyone,
I am on a Paradigm pump, but I have a brother who has a learning disability AND Type 1 diabetes and the place where he lives couldn’t handle him with a pump and he’s back on MDIs.
Recently he started using the BD Autoshield needles. Today we were at lunch and after he gave himself the shot, I asked to see the needle to check it out. I noticed that the part of the needle that goes into the pen was bent at a terrible angle. I thought that this might be some weird safety feature and used up another one of his needles to check and see if it happened again. It didn’t. After removing the needle from the pen, the part that gets inserted into the pen (what is that part called anyway??) was straight.
My brother’s coordination is a bit off, and he has trouble with fine motor skills and I noticed that he is not able to get the needle directly onto the pen without tweaking it a bit. My question is:
Is he getting the insulin? He’s with me for the duration of the afternoon and I will have him check his BS every hour and see if he stays where he should. If not, then there seems to be a design flaw in these needles.
I noticed with the other pen needles he had, the part that goes into the pen seemed to be a different gauge than the part of the needle that goes into the person. These Autoshields look to be the same gauge (29) that inserts into the pen and person.
Does anyone have experience with these needles not delivering insulin because they bent as they were placed into the pen?
Thanks to everyone who can give me some feedback on this. I’ll try and check back in later post how his BS readings went today.
These are the pen needles with a safety shield(like they use in the hospital) right? No, if the other end of the needle doesn’t go through the rubber on the pen, he won’t get any insulin, but the plunger will be hard to push. Is this a group home? No nurse?
The nurse handles about 20 homes and is very difficult to deal with. I kept calling him about stuff with my brother when he first moved there and they threatened to remove him if I didn’t leave the nurse alone… AND I cannot bring him back home with me 
His blood sugar has gone down from 360 pre-meal to 280 post. I’m going to keep watching it.