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The thing that frustrated me most reading this was #1. And not even that the support person didn't suggest sending the new pump elsewhere (though they should have), but that the author didn't simply say, "I'm not home and need you to send it to a different address". I get the general point that she didn't want to make waves with someone who is going to be helping her deal with a condition that is life-threatening, but that simple sentence is not "waves", it's just... normal, reasonable communication. This would have solved the entire problem, right there, immediately. The author would have been doing the annoying cartridge swap until the next morning, and then would have had a new pump waiting at their hotel. No more stress, no need for a blog post longer than, "my insulin pump was on its last legs while I was on vacation, but the company got me a new one in less than 24 hours and everything was fine and not particularly stressful at all, whew!" I agree that #2 is reasonable. The insulin pump manufacturer isn't going to put a doctor on the phone for any random call to their customer service line. I do think they should have doctors on staff who can be escalated to, though, if needed. #3 I'm not sure about. When I send a message to my doctors, the messaging system is very clear to warn me with every message I send that it may be several business days before they respond. If the messaging system in question has that same warning, that's on the author again, even if they were lulled into a false sense of on-call levels of response times based on past experience. #4 doesn't feel reasonable to me at all. Insulin should not be gated by a prescription. I'm fine-ish with the idea that insulin can be available through a prescription (because then you'll likely get a better deal on it when your insurance company covers it). Downthread it seems that in the US you can walk into any pharmacy or Walmart and buy some forms of insulin without a prescription, for a fairly reasonable price. I guess the author didn't know about this. #5 is not reasonable in the least. Any pharmacy employee should be able to search for the closest branch with insulin, regardless of distance, or be able to say "give me the closest insulin to these coordinates" or something like that. That's just absolutely terrible UX in whoever specced out and implemented that search function. |