Status report

Status report

Yesterday we talked about what happens if you take a left turn from the home screen: You end up in Worthless Graphland. But what if you take the other fork in the road? What if you turn right instead? Clicking the right button takes you to a series of screens that give you the current operational status of the pump. There’s some good info in here, even if I might arrange it a bit differently.

The first page tells you when your last bolus was, how much it was, and what kind it was. The next screen gives you your IOB. Does that order make sense to you? I’d rather have the IOB first, as I use it more. But I can see where last bolus can make sense as a priority for some folks. Who among us, half way through a bacon triple cheese burger deluxe with fries, hasn’t had an alarm go off in our heads: Oh my God… Did I remember to take insulin for this meal?

Two clicks to check and you can be back to feeding yer face.

After IOB on the Snap is a temp rate status screen, if you’re running a temp rate. Right now I am, so the Snap is showing me the rate (zero, as I did a super bolus with my breakfast), and the time remaining (11 minutes, as breakfast was quite a while ago). If I weren’t running a temp rate, this screen would show me which basal profile is active and what the current flow rate is.

The next screen shows the amount of insulin remaining in the penfill inside the pump body. Mine shows I’m not-quite running on fumes with 32.85 units remaining. That’ll get me through the day today and through tonight as well. This screen also makes note of the fact that I started this penfill nine days ago, so this body will have lasted me ten days by the time I snap on my last Snap body tomorrow. What will I do ten days after that? You’ll just have to wait to find out.

Next screen over is the pump alert, a feature so sucky I’m dedicating tomorrow’s entire post to it. But briefly, it’s a difficult to set and more difficult to monitor alarm that’s the only thing I can find to function as a site-change reminder (recall that while you can stretch the use of the body to the max, you’d be a fool to do the same with the part of the infusion set that rests on, and inserts through, your skin).

Following the alert screen, there’s a screen that tells you when you last primed the cannula. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I suppose you could use that as an ass-backward site-change reminder, but I hate reminders that you have to remember to check. It rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

The final screen shows the software version, which is meaningless to me, but would probably be of use to their support staff if something totally funky happened to the pump and I had to phone “home” for help.

Next time: Remembering to remember