Roughly six months ago, I wrote a blog post in which I gave diabetes supply company Byram Healthcare a glowing review.

Now, I take back everything I said then (and have since updated the post with a preface).

I truly believe that Byram gave me the worst customer service that I’ve ever experienced as it relates to my diabetes…and maybe that I’ve ever had in life, in general.

It’s a long, messy story – one that spans half of this year – but I’ll break it down for you.

Basically, I found it in January 2021 that Dexcom would no longer be directly supplying their products to customers. I’d be automatically transferred to Byram Healthcare, a medical equipment distributer. However, I didn’t want to use Byram and called them after I got my first order in the mail a few months later to see if I could 1) return the supplies to them, 2) get a refund for said supplies once they were returned, and 3) cancel my account because I wasn’t going to be using them.

At that time, I was told yes to all three of those things. I got a return label from them so I could mail back the supplies, which I did within days of making that phone call to customer support. That way back in early May.

Imagine my surprise when I started receiving bills from Byram in June that stated I owed them $263 for those same Dexcom supplies that I had mailed back and was told I wouldn’t have to pay for because I never used them – I never even opened the original box!

So of course I contacted Byram. I was told to ignore the bill, that a note would be made on my account (mind you, the account that I’d closed) that I didn’t owe any money. Sounds like it was simple and easy to take care of, right? Oh, so very wrong. I received at least two more bills in the mail from them (which immediately reignited my anger both times). Naturally, I called on both of those occasions and was assured TWO MORE TIMES that I didn’t owe money and that I should ignore those bills because they were being automatically generated by their billing system, which was being falsely triggered because my mailed-back supplies weren’t checked in at the warehouse yet.

Stupidly, I believed them and assumed that the whole nightmare was over when the bills stopped coming in the mail…but everything changed the day that I got the collection notice.

Yup, that’s right – Byram had a collection agency COMING AFTER ME because according to them, I had failed to pay the $263 bill THAT I NEVER OWED IN THE FIRST PLACE. The moment I read that notice, I felt pure rage roiling in my core. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought this whole saga ended months ago! Now I’d have to use time I didn’t have – because it was a workday afternoon and I was trying to get real-life stuff done before the weekend – to sort this mess out.

I was beyond upset. Life with diabetes is hard enough, but throw this BS into it and it’s just not fair that getting my regular 90-day supply of a key component of my diabetes toolkit turned into something so stressful and potentially expensive. I was determined to get answers and get reassurance once and for all that they were in the wrong here, not me.

I was able to look up the USPS tracking number for the mailed-back supplies which turned into the proof I needed for both Byram and their collections agency that I had, indeed, done my end of the bargain this past May. When I finally got into contact with their billing department after nearly 30 minutes of being on hold (oh, and after a first attempt to call them during which I “held my place in line” using that option on the service line, only to never get a damn phone call back), I heard the lamest excuse for the whole thing about how they’d recently switched warehouses for this sort of thing, which explained why the billing system wasn’t registering my returned order…

…how do you think I reacted to that news? Like that’s MY fault for their company’s obvious disorganization!?

Needless to say, I didn’t care about excuses, I just wanted assurance that this whole nightmare would go away as soon as possible and they’d do everything possible to accomplish that…which I received in a short amount of time after speaking with the customer service rep.

So yeah, to say that I am displeased and untrusting of Byram Healthcare is a bit of an understatement. I thought it was important to share this story here on Hugging the Cactus not because I want to damage this company’s reputation, but because I want to help anyone else with diabetes who gets Dexcom supplies to avoid going through anything similar. Take my experience as a reminder to advocate for yourself and always hold onto records and receipts from your supply distributors…

…because you never know when you might need them to defend yourself.