Ad hoc

A few words about the actual pump, Emilie has been using: A D-Tron Plus from Disetronic - or, rather, Accu-Chek, which is the brand name after Roche’s acquisition of Disetronic’s pump business in 2003.

The pump was easy to learn, also for Emilie – easier than we had expected. The functionality has to be described as basic as compared to the newest pumps on the market, but actually, we have only been missing one thing: The ability to give an ordinary bolus while the pump is giving an extended bolus.

That would be very useful when Emilie wanted to eat some fruit or dessert after having started an extended bolus to for instance a pasta or pizza meal. The extended bolus itself has been very useful, because when you are using only rapid acting analog insulin, it really shows that some types of food are very slowly digested in the body.

After one year Emilie’s pump was replaced by the new ‘Plus’-model – as we understood it due to a potential software problem in the original D-Tron model. However, our first D-Tron Plus had an inexplicable E7 electronic error-alarm each day at noon – but this pump was replaced immediately.

One specific part of the pump, however, has caused us some trouble: the adapter. And as we understand, we have not been the only ones who have had problems with that part. The ‘A4′ alarm was for a period of several months a bit of a nuisance, and even though we were told that the error did not really affect the insulin delivery, when the alarm went off, we had to change the adapter to get rid of it.

Of course, the alarm often sounded at the most awkward moments. For instance, we had to change the adapter twice within a few minutes at three o’clock in the morning in a bus on our way to London …

In situations like that you notice, that you are dealing with advanced and complicated equipment. You really put a lot of trust into that little thing. We know that nobody or nothing is perfect, but we have to say that to have complete confidence in such a product we find it crucial as a user to be as fully and as immediately informed about problems as possible. And as we see it, the information to the end user about the adapter problems left something to be desired.

This is the fourteenth post in a series - read the first post here.

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