Has anyone gotten their heater yet?

[jbeany]

I had to do bags today.  I really tired of waiting for this stinkin' heater!  I had an electric blanket on me, as well as a small ceramic heater on high blowing about 12 inches from face, and I was still down to 94 degrees when I finished.  My teeth were chattering, I was shivering so hard.  Hypothermia is any body temp below 95, for heaven's sake.  They promised we would get them in the fall.  Well, it's fall - and the only thing falling around here is my temp!

[Black]

That had to be terribly miserable.  Brrrrrrr!  Have you reminded customer service that you don't have one?

Mike's had a heater since our first day at home 2/26/07.  Once in a while when we have to run bags he forgets to turn the heater on before we start and the "chill" reminds him.  Takes about 20 minutes for his teeth to stop chattering.

[Adam_W]

I've also been wondering about the new warmers. I still have the warmer that they sent me for my last trip, and I don't intend t send it back until they actually ask for it. I've had to use bags a couple times, and I've been glad that I haven't sent the warmer back.

Adam

[KR Cincy]

No heater here yet...fortunately, we haven't had to use bags. I dont' know why they can't get it together on this issue...I can't imagine going with bags and no heater...that was brave.

[skyedogrocks]

That is horrible!  They should give you a heater no matter what.  Rob uses bags, so his heater is on all the time.  Now and then he has to turn it up because he is cold.

If he for some reason forgot to put the warmer on, I put one of our quilts in the dryer for about 2 mins and put that on him, it keeps the heat on and warms him up nicely.

I would definitely complain to your nurse and customer service!

[KR Cincy]

I was at an event yesterday and the local NxStage rep was there...he said the new warmers should be available in January, and the new design he described sounded much better for traveling, so hopefully he wasn't being optimisitic and we can actually get them by then.

[cev]

It is insane to expect you to use bags without a heater.  loudly complain to customer service and your nurse or MD.  When we have a problem our MD or nurse is our strongest support and contacts NxStage

[jbeany]

My nurse already knows - she's gotten the same answer from the rep as Cincy - nothing until at least January.  The nurse only has one heater, and she is using it for training new patients right now.  If I knew ahead of time when I needed it, I could probably borrow it - but I didn't need it for traveling, I needed it because of a problem.  The center is closed by the time I start dialysis at night, and too far away to drive to quickly if I found out about the problem in time to get there before they closed.  I did bags a couple of times without the heater over the summer, but the house was usually 85 degrees inside on the days I was doing it.  It's not so easy to do when the house is set for 68!

[Meinuk]

It hasn't been a good Nxstage week for me.  Cartridge/run failures, then pureflow leaks.  When it rains it pours.  My rant last month was "why the hell do you keep sending me dialysate - when I don't have a heater?" - we've had some ordering snafus - My schedule was changed - but no one told me - so they guessed my order.  My poor little apartment now has two walls of boxes.  (and I swore I'd never stockpile!)

I've already posted about my cartridge errors - now resolved. Now on to my pureflow...

I was in the middle of my run on Tursday night.  Let's just say that Thursday was a terrible day, a very sad day on top of a very sad week.  I was in no mood for my pureflow to act up.  And it did the alarm started, the display read "Leak in Tub" .  This was my second leak so far.  The last one was a broken line.  I took a deep breath, sat up in my chair, grabbed the manual and tried to rinse back.  Of course the cycler wasn't going to allow me to do a cycler rinseback.  (that would have been too easy) So, I flipped to the Manual Rinse back portion of the book, and proceeded to go through the steps.  Of course, no matter how hard I squeezed the saline bag - nothing happened.  I finally gave up.

Friday morning was my monthly clinic visit.  I complained to my nurse.  She told me to call Nxstage.  Now, let me tell you about my calls to Nxstage.  Maybe because I dialize at night, maybe I'm just unlucky - but I have NEVER gotten through to a technician.  I have always been answered by the answering service, explain all of my details, and then either waited on hold for a technician or have been called back.  This does not instill comfort in me, so, if I have an emergent situation, I try to troubleshoot it myself, I want to save my blood, not wait on hold. But I digress..

My nurse told me to call Nxstage and demand a heater.  The truth was that I missed 2 Dialysis session in one week and that was unacceptable.  So I called, and I found out that my customer service rep does not have the authority to automatically send out a heater (she needed supervisor permission)  BUT the techs can send out heaters so she transferred me.  Problem solved.  I spoke with the tech, they sent out the heater over night, and I promised to send back the latest leaky pureflow Sak.

The saga continues...

Last night I called tech support at 7:30 as promised to let them know the lot number of the leaky SAK (my original call was from my office)  It wasn't an emergency, so I didn't mind getting the answering service and being put on hold.  I did make a nasty comment about it, but it just confirmed my apprehension.  I gave them the sak number and called it a night.

At 10, I started making a batch to use over the weekend.  All well and good.  Since it has been such a depressing week, I slinked off to bed.  Just as I was dozing off, I heard the alarm.  I got out of bed swearing like a sailor.  Walked into the livingroom and saw the redlight on the pureflow.  Not only was it beeping, and flashing but it added a new sound to it's symphony... an intermittent buzzing. I grabbed my phone and hit redial.  The answering service said hello.  I started yelling.  They put me on hold, and fairly quickly the technician answered.  (Just a couple of mins)  But let me tell you when you are mourning, and just awoken by a mechanical failure - well...  You get the picture.  Now from a minor annoyance has flared up the question "How am I going to dialize this weekend?"  I asked the tech to track the heater.  He didn't have access to the tracking number.  I very carefully vented.  I asked the Technician to please not take any of my vitriol personally, but he was going to hear about it. 

He was a good customer service rep.  He heard me out.  Eric promised to follow up and offered to be personally responsible for tracking the heater.  He even gave me his shift times, and explained that the phones shouldn't have gone to answering service, because he hadn't had any calls in 18 mins.  He said that he would look into it and I believe him.  He followed up this morning to tell me that the heater was on its way as scheduled.  And he was right.  I now have a heater.

Over the course of all of my phone calls in the past two days everyone from NxStage has assured me that the heater issue is soon going to be over, and that they are shipping them.  I now can say that I felt the pain of the heater shortage (of course not as drastically as Jbeany) But it still beats dialyzing in center.


NOTE:  My life is a never ending search for typos - (if you notice, almost all of my posts are edited, I think it is a form of OCD - oh well) as I went in to correct this post, I thought about how Susie used to laugh and laugh when I wrote about yelling at people, she would have laughed at last night, me standing in my nightshirt going off on the Nxstage Tech...  I think that I'm going to have a lot of these Susie moments, as are quite a few of us, so yes, she is gone, but this is just an example of how she is still with us.

[jbeany]

Well, at least you got some results! (And a heater!)  I posted the letter my nurse got from NxStage about the heaters on another thread.  No heaters for old patients for another 2 to 3 months.  Fine.  It's just costing them more to send me extra supplies, since any day I have to rearrange my schedule, I just waste 20 L of dialysate down the drain.

I keep ordering to replace my stock of prebagged, and they don't send any.  I get bags of the connections, but not any fluid.  The only time they did send some, I got one box - which is half a treatment.  I need to call and have my own rant at them about that, but I've been to busy with other things to deal with it right now.

And I agree - it is still better than in-center!

[silverhead]

I called them about a week ago, tried to talk to the lady that is assigned to us, but as usual she was not there, I complained that we never seem to be able to talk to her, and it seemed that our oder was not enough for a month, the Gal I talked with would not say so outright, but admitted that they have been growing really fast and it appears that there is some chaos as far as establishing a reliable order system, sure hope they iron it out soon.......

[kitkatz]

Do you all want to borrow the big stick and wave it at a few people?