Paradigm help urgent!

I have a minimed paradigm insulin pump with a broken screen, dropped it and now most of the screen is black. I am ordering a replacement from minimed, but that will not come in till tuesday (it is sun night now). I have to work and cannot take off mon and tues. I only have a prescription for humilin (fast acting insulin) so if I give myself shots, I will have to do it every 2 hours or so. ugh.

so, main problem is…
I ran out of insulin in the pump (which has been working fine for a few days with the broken screen) and I need to change the reservoir. medtronic will not tell me how many times to press the act and down button to change the reservoir. I need somebody with the same pump as me to just tell me for example “act, down 3 times, act, down, act, down” PLEASE.

Even though NPH ins not the best insulin in the world, you can buy it over the counter to help you get through the next few days. Or you could also buy Regular insulin OTC and it would last 4-6 hours in your body. Whatever you do, just be sure to test a lot so you can correct as needed. I would even set an alarm for the middle of the night just because you won’t know exactly how your body will respond to those insulins.

I think you’d be crazy to use a pump when you couldn’t read the screen at all. Also, you may think that only the screen is broken, but you have no way of knowing what has happened to the insides of the pump. People are so critical of the pump companies when things go wrong, but this is an instance where I believe you could be putting yourself in danger by continuing to use the pump.

Even if you could change the res, how the heck can you bolus / prime / with no screen or read any alarms that might result There is a reason MM won’t walk you through the buttons and such!



I’m with Lathump on the “putting yourself in danger by continuing to use the pump” with no screen.

How ARE you using the pump now sweakley???

IF oyur worried ab out the cost of OTC regular insulin go to Walmart and ask for their Reli-On brand. It used to be half the price of either Humlin ir Novlin. Last I checked the Reli-on brand is now being furnished by Lili.

Not sure of all the facts. It has been a long time since I did insulin OTC.

I had a similar situation recently and, perhaps strangely, seemed to resurrect my pump, getting an “A21” error message instead of the “button error” message which the MM rep said “means I have to send you a new pump”. The buttons were not 100% recovered, in that they were working strangely, but then the A21 error went away too and I was like “whee I have a pump again” but I decided not to use it because I felt that not knowing what the problems were (and this was 4th of July holiday weekend here, so no support available…) and I didn’t want to get into a scenario where it would OD me or perhaps not quite as severe but wake me up in the middle of the night bleeping at me and have the fried buttons not let me shut it up.