Where’s the site change reminder? Apparently with Waldo, wherever he is…

This is how it should be: If you fill a cannula a pump knows you’ve just changed your site. That should trigger a reminder that this needs to be done again in either two days, three days, or four days—depending on how sensitive your skin is and how bad your health insurance is.

It should be seamless and automatic. You shouldn’t have to do a fucking thing to make it happen. Furthermore, there should be a quick and easy place to double check when that impending reminder is going to happen. In short, there should be a site-change reminder screen so that when I get ready for bed at night I can check to see if I should leave out a new infusion set for the next morning.

So in a perfect world, a system like that would rate a ten on a scale of one to ten. How does the Snap pump fare in this regard?

I’d give it a one. Or maybe a zero. Or perhaps a negative three. And to add insult to injury, the Snap needs a good site-change tracking, reminder, and status system more than any other pump on the planet because the reservoir changes are completely independent from the site changes. It’s bad enough to try to remember anything that happens on a three-day basis (because it’s never the same day of the week from week to week), but now there are two schedules to take care of. Plus, if you use CGM, it will be in it’s own little site-change schedule, too. I’m surprised no one is getting rich selling diabetes day-planners.

So here’s what I’ve been doing on the Snap, and I hate, hate, hate, hate it. Did I mention that I hate it? I’ve been setting the “Pump Alert.” This is a feature that lets me manually set a countdown alarm. The range of the alert can be as little as six hours or as much as nine days and 18 hours. Don’t ask me how they came up with that range. The hours can only be selected in 6-hour increments.

But getting where you need to be to actually set this alarm is tedious, to say the least. Let me take you through the process. Uh….you might want to brew a cup of strong coffee first.

First, press any button to wake up the pump.

Then, select the “Menu” button.

Next, you need to skip over the following menus:

Bolus

Stop

Basal

Prime

Log Book, and then:

Select the “Set Up” menu.

After that, you need to skip over all of the following menus:

Time

BG Prompt

BG Units

Low Insulin

Notification Timing

Daily Alerts

Auto Off

Beep Volume

BG Log Target

Delivery Limit

Button Guard

Intro Screen

Flashlight

Screen Timeout

And finally, select “Pump Alert.”

That’s 24 button presses, just to get there. Ow. I have a cramp in my thumb. And now I still need to set the alert, both the days and the hours. At least the Snap remembers what I set the last time.

It is, by far, the greatest number of button presses you’ll ever need to do anything on the Snap pump. What the fuck were they thinking?

Now, I do need to mention one other (in theory) cool option. The Snap has a “notification timing” option. This lets you choose between having the pump remind you when the timer expires, no matter what, or choose to have it remind you when you next turn on the pump. This sounds great in theory—no one likes to have a reminder alarm wake them up if they are sleeping in—but using this feature screws up your timing. Once you acknowledge the alarm by telling the pump “OK,” the Snap resets and starts counting down again.

Well, I don’t know about you, but my life is not so precise. What if I get busy and don’t change my site until the next day? Now my site change timer is off. The only way to reset it is to follow that tortuous path laid out above and turn the reminder off, then turn it back on again. And once a timer is running, you can’t stack a second reminder on top of it. If you have a change of heart, or have your infusion set ripped out by a passing door knob, you have to cancel the old alert and then start a new one.

This lack of a proper site reminder sucks, sucks, SUCKS!! It should be automatic with the cannula prime. Or at least it shouldn’t be buried at the bottom of the set-up menu half way to hell, 24 button clicks downstream.

Twenty four clicks for something we need to do every two or three days?

Boooooo…Hisssssss.

Next time: On the other hand, there are areas were the Snap really shines