Refillable pen

Diabetes Technology
1

I don’t know anything about reusable pens. So I have a couple of questions.

  1. Is there a pen you can fill from a vial or another manufacturer’s kwikpen. Both of the insulins I use for MDI only come in a vial or kwikpen. Lantus being the one I want to use it for.

  2. And I would like to get a pen that remembers the last dose given and when. I don’t need one that calculates dosage etc.

It is mostly for the Lantus that I give myself a shot twice a day. I play with the dose sometimes, plus I am going to be reprogramming my basal again in my PDM and will making adjustments. I am using Lantus for a partial basal dose. It would be nice to be able to look at it and know definitively what dose I had tried the day before!!! Yes, I am lazy and never write this stuff down. I just always wing it, but to be able to look and know would be kind of nice!

2

Yes, there are a few digital pens on the market that are pretty awesome. They take standard 300ml insulin cartridges, including Humalog, Lantus, Novalog, and others.

The problem is that they are not cheap, not FDA approved and have to be imported from overseas. These pens dose in 0.1 units, keep the last 500-1000 doses in memory and use stepping motors so you can inject as much insulin as you want painfree. So for your 2 doses, let’s say you take one standard dose in the the morning of 6.2 units and 5.8 units in the evening, you can preset those amounts and they will automatically be set for you AM and PM shots. When the pen shows 6.2, for example, if you want a little more, you just adjust in 0.1 unit increments so it can quickly be adjusted to let’s say 7.1 units. Then you set how much and how fast you want your injections. I find the most comfortable to set the stepper motor to inject 0.5 units or fraction thereof every second. The most robust pens I have been using for the past 2+ decades is made in Korea and the pen I now use is a Chinese pen because the Korean pen is not currently available.

Look at the following 2 links just to get an idea of their function or capabilities. If you are seriously interested, send me a PM and you can work with my office in China that buys them for me direct from the factory to get one for you. You would need to budget in the $200-250 range including transportation, import documents and most likely a 6-8 week lead time if put on one of my containers. I have helped a few members on this forum to get one in the past. In the past I referred people on this board to an overseas pharmacy that could handle the international transaction. I don’t have a pharmacy contact at this time so I would need to set you up with a contact in Asia you can deal with. I am sure you can understand that since I am not licensed to import DME, I can’t get financially involved with the transaction.

Let me know if you want more information. If the following links don’t automatically load, just copy and paste them in any browser.Phray500 pen

https://www.globalsources.com/product/medical-insulin-pen_1205630069f.htm

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3

Thank You @CJ114 It sounds perfect. But when you say cartridges, I don’t think Lantus comes in a cartridge in the US? It’s not listed on their site and my formulary doesn’t list it either. I doubt that you can fill a cartridge and then put it in the pen? Buying it from Canada wouldn’t work, I have purchased insulins before from Canada to try. But in this case my cost for a 90 day supply of Lantus is under $20.

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@Marie20
The solution posted by @CJ114 seems like it has everything you need. But as mentioned, it is expensive.

There is a very cheap hack you can do that provides some of what you want, but maybe not everything.

There is a pen cap that has a timer. The way it works is when you take it off the insulin pen and then put it back on, the counter starts. So this would at least tell you how long it’s been since your last dose. You can look at the timer and know when you took your last dose. It doesn’t tell you how much, but it does tell you how long it’s been. So this covers most of your #2 requirement. All except the amount of the dose.

Here is the timer cap:
Timesulin – The Pen Timer – Diapointshop

As far as your #1 requirement, that’s easy. The Kwikpen can be filled with whatever you want! You get your vials of Lantus and use it to fill the Kwikpen. (I have posted on FUD about how to do this.)

You need to “rinse” it first, to remove the Humalog. But after you do that, you can refill it and not worry about it anymore.

If you fill it with Lantus 3 times, and empty it each time, you have made it extremely pure.

If you fill it with 300 units of Lantus and empty it as fully as you can each time, after the 3rd time, this is the purity of the Lantus you have in it:

99.9999790595037 %

And each time you fill it back up with Lantus, it becomes even more pure Lantus!

To put this in perspective, after you have flushed it with Lantus 3 times, if you were to take 10 units of Lantus with the pen, you might have 0.000002 units of Humalog in that dose. That isn’t really anything that would mess up your day.

Again, this might not be the most elegant solution, but it is cheap.

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I did not do well on Lantus or Levemir due to repeated nighttime lows, so I gave up long-term insulins a few years back and don’t remember where I got the cartridges. If Levemir works for you, you may want to check if those are currently available in your market. I strictly use fast-acting Humalog cartridges now and they are easily available anywhere.

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Sanofi doesn’t sell Lantus in the US in 3ml penfill vials. I did a quick search and I can’t find basaglar or semglee in 3ml vials either. That’s why Marie asked for a refillable or just fillable pen. The tree hugger in me does not understand America’s fascination with throwing away plastic.

@Marie20 if you don’t find exactly what you are looking for here’s another pencap option Bigfoot Unity Diabetes Management Program Where Eric’s suggestion is like attaching an egg timer to the pen Bigfoot is like attaching the kitchen sink.

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