I’m just curious…I’m cutting it close on my next 90 day order of tandem pump reservoirs. If I absolutely had to, could I reuse a reservoir? It seems to me I could. The pump couldn’t tell, could it?
I guess I’m asking is there any medical reason I couldn’t or should t?
Go for it, but like most of what we do… It’s at your own risk. I do it all the time when I’m in hurry or feeling lazy. Others comment frequently here about doing it, too.
The medical reasons are that insulin degrades in it, and I suppose there’s increased risk of bacterial infection… But both of those are near moot, unless you’re extremely insulin sensitive. Basically there’s 15-20 units of degraded insulin left in the cartridge that you’re going to add fresh insulin to. That insulin isn’t ineffective, it just isn’t quite as effective as fresh insulin. But if you’re adding 200-300 units to the cartridge, you’re really not going to see a difference. If you’re only adding the minimum 50 units, then the degraded bit is going to be more obvious. As to the risk of infection, the insulin has preservatives that kill off contaminants, so there shouldn’t be anything incubating inside the cartridge.
If you’re using FIASP or Apidra, though, the answer might be different. Since those ones are already prone to occlusions, especially at 2-3 days, pushing it longer might turn into an alarming (literally) nightmare.
Thx Robyn
I think I’ll have the new ones in time. I just wanted to be sure I could reuse if I had to.
Otherwise you could add an extra day worth of insulin to your cartridge and leave it for the extra des. No need to refill then. Because you waste insulin every time you reload.
I’ve done it. The tubing coming off it started to break by the end of my second use.
Still it was fine for 6 days
I fill tandem reservoirs full: 300u insulin. To stretch my supply of luer-lock reservoirs I tried refilling and it worked. Three fills of 300u worked ok — for me that’s 15-18 days of use for each reservoir. But on a 4th fill of a reservoir I got the sense that I was not getting full doses of insulin. The story I told myself is that the shuttle plunger in the cartridge was wearing out and so some insulin got pumped while some insulin bypassed the plunger and stayed in the cartridge.
So you may be able to run 900u of insulin through each tandem cartridge with no problem. But do change the infusion set every 3 days to avoid lipohypertrophy or whatever the “scar tissue” is called.