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Levimer Pen Failure

O

O_DP_T1

Well-Known Member
Messages
458
Location
United Kingdom
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
So this evening take my Levimer as usual, do the usual squirt a couple of drops into the air and load up the 17 units whack it into leg and there's about 3-4 click an no matter how hard i pressed the rest just would not go in. I I just got another pen and administered the rest. Are these pens not very reliable then? 40 years on syringes and NO issues ever.
 
Hi @O_DP_T1 It happened to me several times on Levemir pens and once with a Novorapid pen. I think any time a device becomes more complex ( e.g. plain syringes to pens) and the components are cheapened (metal components in reusable pens to plastic in disposable pens) the risk of malfunction increases. They call it 'progress"!!!! Fortunately the un-administered dosage is visible.
 
Yes mine gets stuck occasionally for no particular reason but being an old hack I still marvel at these pens and needles.
When I started out 44 years ago I had a glass syringes I used to have to boil.
I had to mix my own insulin.
The needles were more than twice the size of my current nanopass 4mm ones.
I could go on but you get my point..........

Tony
 
Are you using the plastic pre-filled pens? I've only ever used 1 box of those in the past and they don't feel as robust as the cartridge novopens which are metal (mostly) and I've only, in 20 years, had 1 problem with the novopens.
 
I've had a few Lantus flexpens malfunction before over the years, which I believe are similar if not identical to the Levimir and Novorapid flexpens internally. It's annoying but just one of those things that will happen sometimes, just hope it's not your last one.
 
I went back to using syringes many years ago, after a series of insulin pens that failed to operate properly. I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble to continue when a syringe would operate perfectly and reliably and the pens didn't. We need tech that works all the time - not stuff that just fails abruptly.
 
Tony337 said:
When I started out 44 years ago I had a glass syringes I used to have to boil.
I had to mix my own insulin.
The needles were more than twice the size of my current nanopass 4mm ones.
I could go on but you get my point..........

Tony
Click to expand...
Remember them too well.....Needles the size of darning needles BUT darning needles were sharper

I have only ever had 1 pen fail on me, around 4 years ago and that was a NovoSluggish pen
 
porl69 said:
I have only ever had 1 pen fail on me, around 4 years ago and that was a NovoSluggish pen
Click to expand...

Same here, only had one disposable pen fail on me in the last 5+ years (I think it was the Lantus pen).
recently I've had a number of issues caused by the needles (such as do air shot, get nothing, do air shot again, get nothing, try again, still get nothing - give up change needle) - but replacing the needles fixed it
 
I've had similar experiences but possibly not a pen problem. Like you I've found the injection has stopped part way, I cannot press it down. However I can pull the pen out & inject the rest somewhere else. It may be that I'd hit a bad injection site - hard to see as each time I was using my buttocks. Or possibly just the pen jamming momentarily.
This then leads to the question of how much insulin actually went in?
 
I'm not a fan of the levemir flexpens. When I compare them to the reuseable pen I have for my humalog (Humapen Luxur) they feel far less reliable. That said, sometimes the pen stops because the injection site has been overused but even so, this seems more common with the flexpen than the reuseable one.
 
Sophia78 said:
sometimes the pen stops because the injection site has been overused but even so, this seems more common with the flexpen than the reuseable one.
Click to expand...


I'm assuming is this happens you just whack the remaining units into into another area. I very very sometimes used to get that with syringes where the plunger could not be squeezed all the way down due to hitting an over used injection spot.
 
O_DP_T1 said:
I'm assuming is this happens you just whack the remaining units into into another area. I very very sometimes used to get that with syringes where the plunger could not be squeezed all the way down due to hitting an over used injection spot.
Click to expand...

I should do that but often I just take longer to inject, leaving the needle in and just pushing out a unit or two as and when until it's done.

Typing that out I realise just how bad that sounds!
 
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