1 year old with diabetes?

Our cat is now about 1 year old and a few weeks ago we noticed some sore looking things on our cats bottom. Apparently it was from her licking her behind too much... anyways, we took her to the vet to have her checked out, while we were there they gave her a rabbies vaccine and a feline leukemia vaccine because apparently she was due and something to help her stop licking her bottom so much so it would heal. Anyways, as soon as we got home she started vomiting all over the place and it was just... bad... anyways, we went back to the vet immediatley and they gave her something to help her stop vomiting and gave her fluids and she seemed better. They said she had a reaction to one of the vaccines.

Fast forward a week or two and we were noticing her urinating quite a bit. So much infact that if we didn't clean the litter box twice daily there was so much urine in there you couldn't even hardly clean it out without breaking the scooper. I had to just dump out all the litter and refill with fresh. Now i'm having to clean it twice a day to keep up. After this started happening with the massive amounts of pee we took her back to the vet and they ran blood tests. They called back today and said her glucose level was 400 and they want us to bring her back in so they can i guess get a 24 glucose curve and figure out how much insulin she needs. They want us to leave her for 2-3 days so they can figure that out.

So... anyways, does this seem strange a 1 year old cat with diabetes or is something else going on? Did the shots she get some how do this to her or was it just coincidence? She's pretty healthy and up until recently she's been the most energetic cat I've been around. She begun to gain some weight lately, she weights 13 lbs at the moment which seems a little high but I don't know really. We feed her avoderm which I hear is pretty good food.

Anyways, if she does have full blown diabetes i plan to learn as much as I can and figure out the home testing methods and try to work with it the best we can. We both work 8 to 5 jobs and don't really come home for lunch or anything so I'm not sure how easy it will be to regulate our kitty...

Any advice?

Thanks.

 

Hello Yaric. I am so glad you found us. Yes I would agree that 1 year is young but unfortunately cats don't always read the textbooks ;-)

DId your vet happen to run any other blood tests (possibly check her kidneys?) The fact the your cat had gained weight does not follow most signs and symptoms of diabetes. Generally they lose weight because their body if not able to utilize any of the calories they have consumed.

Another thing is that most cats blood glucose will run high while at the vets office due to stress hormones. It at all possible it would be good if you could try and test at home. This would give you a better idea of how she is doing. Some vets insist that you leave the cat there for a few days to "regulate" them but you really can't regulate any cat in just a few days (not including the increased glucose levels from stress). Some cats will not even eat when at the vets and eating is of utmost importance when a cat is on insulin.

There is alot more that I want to say but I will give you a chance to answer some questions....
Forgive me but I am not familiar with Avoderm..

Do you feed wet or dry food? (low carb high protein is always suggested with diabetic cats - and is not bad for healthy cats as well) Dry food is most often very high in carbs and making a change to wet food may very well correct any high glucose levels.

How often do you feed?
Are they any other things going on with Snug? Any infections? Infections or other issued can also increae glucose values.


BTW - one of my cats had the same allergic reaction to her first annual vaccines. We now premedicate her before any vaccines to prevent that unpleasant experience.

 

hi and welcome.

is there any chance you could find out what types of medications have been given to your kitty, both for the booty problem and after the vaccine reaction?? i'm wondering if one of them was a steroid and how much was given is why i ask. steroids can induce or bring on diabetes, especially in a kitty that is on their way there to begin with.

as was mentioned one years old is young for a diabetes diagnosis but not unheard of. also as was said, usual we see drastic weight loss in a diabetic prior to diagnosis.

and one last thing , can you find out if that 400 was obtained via a fructosamine test??

yours is kind of an unusual situation and diagnosis so the more info we can get, the better

btw, from here on out, i'd probably opt out of vaccines for this kitty given her bad reaction to them.

 

check with your vet, i would bet money that your cat was given a shot of steroids. there is such a thing as steroid induced diabetes in cats. you caught it very early so there was no chance or her to lose weight yet like the usual gradual onset of feline diabetes causes. very important to cut dry food out of her diet immediately, all dry food, since the odds are good that her pancreas might recover. please read this: http://www.catinfo.org/
i strongly suggest not leaving her alone unattended at vet's overnight after they have given her insulin. too dangerous. can you get a meter tomorrow (any human meter with 'sipping action' will do, the accu-chek aviva is very newbie friendly) and learn to home test her BG's while stopping all dry food before dropping off for the curve? if you can learn to home test, then you can save yourself a ton of $$ and your cat a ton of stress, and sure let vet give first shot and keep for the first day, but take her home that night and you continue curve in her normal environment where she is not all stressed out and numbers will be more accurate. we can help you understand what the numbers mean. read all you can handle tonight on this site. any questions about anything you don't understand. suggest telling the vet you would like her to start on a low dose of insulin too, too many vets have a habit of starting at too high a dose for many cats. no cat is regulated in a day at vet hospital, regulation is something that happens at home over time.
~jojo
ps. when you pick up the meter at drug store ask them to give you some urine ketone testing strips too. it is important to get daily ketone tests on the brand new diabetic cat.
pss. usually one wants a fructosamine test done before starting insulin, but when you have such dramatic litter box signs after a steroid shot in such a young cat with a BG of 400 imho you have a diabetic cat on your hands now.

btw...did vet find cause for the original reason you brought her in, the bottom licking? did they check her anal glands and make sure they were not full and/or infected?

 

i agree with jojo. i wouldn't want this particular cat left at a clinic unattended with insulin on board. if they are staffed 24 hours/day then that's another thing but if not, given the circumstances of the diabetes development, it could be dangerous for this cat to be unsupervised with insulin on board, especially if they give too much insulin like is known to happen in a clinic setting because kitty gets stressed out which raises BG levels. a shot, monitor, then you take kitty home sounds good to me.

kitties with steroid induced diabetes, if yours is one, have a great remission rate but they have to be handled with care because their pancreas' can kick back in at any moment.

hopefully yours will be one who just needs a diet change and maybe a couple shots of insulin

please let us know what you find out about the medications that were given ok. even if you don't recognize some of them, someone here surely will. jojo along with a couple other vet techs frequent the board and there are members here who have experience with just about anything you can think of so i'm sure we'll know if any of them were steroids.

 

http://www.samantha.cc/images/kitty/super-kitty.jpg
This a picture of her when she was about 4-5 months old being super kitty!

http://www.samantha.cc/images/kitty/retard.jpg
And her being a retard in her bed.

Will try to answer all the questions.
Avoderm - http://www.breeders-choice.com/cat_prod ... tendry.htm

That is what she is eating now. It's a dry food. A while back we started her on the kitten avoderm dry food when we got her from the humane's society. We switched to wet food at one point with some stuff I found at the store. I don't remember exactly what it was called, some sort of natural stuff, smelled so good I wanted to eat it. I choose it because it was the only food I could find with chicken and water as the first ingredients instead of byproducts.

She stopped eating that stuff for some reason and we switched back to the adult avoderm... maybe we shouldn't have.
Right now we just leave the food out for her to eat. She gets half a cup in the morning then half a cup in the evening as per the directions on the package.


I have no idea what the vet gave her for the reaction to the vaccines but i'll try to find out. They said something calm her stomach and that was all I heard the day she was sick... They also mentioned she had a fever that day too that went away fairly quickly.


The other day when she got her blood test she was fairly stressed out it seemed. When he brought her back from taking her blood sample she was clearly roughed up as her fur was a mess and she was somewhat timid of the vet to begin with. I guess I'll get her started back on a wet diet tomorrow and will try to pick up a meter somewheres. I'll try to talk to the vet about not leaving her overnight with them until we do our own BG testing...

We never did get a good answer about why her bottom was messed up in the first place. The sores seem to have heeled since that first visit but she still cleans her behind way more than she ever did in the past now.

 

Find out if they did a sterile test for a urinary tract infection. I sure hope she gets to doing well. I'm with the others. I have to wonder if she had some steroids.

There is Avoderm canned food too.

 

yaric, i don't see this mentioned on another post here, but, if you can, ask your vet to start your cat on Lantus insulin (also called glargine). the remission rates on lantus are excellent for newly diagnosed kitties, and because of the circumstances if you can switch to low carb canned food your cat stands a good chance of going into remission after only a short course of insulin (no guarantees, tho).

 

the dry food may certainly be spiking her bg levels. There also may be something else going on as 1 yr is quite young.

I would definitely find out what they all gave her before you consider startinging on insulin.

Unless there is an underlying problem, taking her off the dry and finding out what meds were given. I would get a meter and start testing her periodically at home. You may see her levels drop simply by removing the dry.

 

As the others have said, 1 year olds getting diabetes is EXTREMELY rare and I think we've seen maybe one or two at most here? And the one I have in mind had Cushings, not diabetes. Please, demand full accounting of what she was given for shots and medicine, and do NOT leave her over night to be regulated. Regulation DOES NOT happen at a clinic!

Jen

 

Well we switched her to wet food... she doesn't seem to happy about that. Didn't eat very much at all. We went out and got a meter that requires .3microliters of blood that was a decent price. We tried for a little while to prick her ear and use the meter but man she was PISSSED. Was hissing and stuff so we quit after a few mins... i guess I will try again tomorrow. On all the vidoe's I've seen the cats just sit there all happy, lol :roll:

 

Try desensitizing her to the poke. Just click it near her ear when she is relaxing and give her a treat. Also, test yourself so you get the idea of what kind of firm pressure you need. If she is getting upset, it won't do either of you any good! I put our period of 3 tries at most at a time. If you are warming the ear, make sure it isn't too hot! Try it on your own ear. Should be quite warm but not HOT.

 

and fwiw, it's completely normal to have these problems when first beginning to test. you have to figure out a routine and kitty has to figure out that you are helping them.

believe me, mine didn't sit all calm and happy in the beginning. actually she barely sat, after i chased her in circles around the house for 30-45 minutes until she was too tired to run anymore. then she clawed and squirmed and yelled at me like crazy. i hadn't even ever touched her before her diagnosis so she was none too happy with the idea of us measly humans manhandling her twice a day. we were also shoving a pill down her throat those first few weeks too and that took both my fiance and myself to get done. and some nights, the pill just plain got lost somewhere in the den.

so just know that it will take a few days if not a week or two for kitty to figure out that the world is not coming to an end because you are playing with their ears

 

We switched out Kitty to wet food the other day as soon as someone on here said to and it seemed to have helped quite a bit very quickly. Within the next day she was peeing less, and today she had basically a normal amount, only two small clumps.

We tried for two days to get a drop of blood for our meter and had zero success. At one point we got a drop of blood from her paw pad and put it in the meter only to have the meter say "ERROR". That was frustrating!

We figured out though that she got way less stressed out with the plucking of the ear rather than of the foot. I figured it would have been the other way around.

Soo.. anyways, we finally got it checked tonight, we got a reading of 151 and she had just eaten about half of her wet food about 10-20 minutes earlier and she had eaten a couple pieces of dry food which we were using to entice her to stay still.

I guess we are going to try to test her tomorrow maybe before a meal and see what we get, but it really seems like she is doing better now.

 

She's not on insulin, right? If so, test her before she eats and then try to get a test about 2 hours later. The food change alone may do it for you.

 

No insulin yet. Haven't been back to the yet after they said her BG level was 400.

 

Okay, what is going on now???

We swtiched Velvet to wet food, everything seems fine, she was very playful, very happy, no excessive peeing, but all of a sudden yesterday she meowed weird and acted a little strange. Today she wouldn't hardly come down stairs except to eat just a little bit. She was hiding under the bed too for a little while which she's never done before.

I carried her down stairs and she seemed really worried, it was strange. Anyways... she was laying down for a while and went to get up and seemed to be having trouble standing up. Finally she got up and was like.. hobbling around, seemed like her rear legs were bothering her. Once she got moving she was fine.

Anyways, we decided that was pretty messed up and checked her blood sugar and it was 48. We checked twice just to make sure and it said 48 both times. We decided to put a drop of two of syrup in her mouth to get it up a little and right now she is down there licking it off of herself still.

But what is the deal? Is that a normal low level? In my quick research that seems way too low and her behavior seemed to back that up. What is causing her low blood sugar now. She is not on any medication or insulin.

 

It appears you are not giving insulin or another diabetes drug. If that is the case the BG of 48 is on the low side of normal. I would talk to your vet since she was young to be diabetic before and there may be something wrong besides what appeared to be diabetes n the past..

 

We plan to take her to the vet soon. After a little syrup on her feet so she'd lick it off and some wet food, we checked it again about about 30-45 mins and it was down to 46. She was just sitting on her chair not wanting to get up. We gave her a bit more syrup and I set out a little dry food for her. Don't really know what else to do.

 

Any updates?

FYI - If you are not giving her insulin, you don't need to give syrup if she is 48............... She can't hypo if she isn't on insulin.

Syrup is only if she is getting too much insulin and her numbers are dropping. The only exception to the rule is if there are other health issues causing her pancreas not to work correctly (tumor, etc). But she most likely does not have any of that being so young!! :thumbup

 

Only reason we gave her syrup was because she was acting so strange and wouldn't eat.

We haven't gotten to the vet yet because girl friend is now very sick too. We are going to try to take her tomorrow.

Her legs seemed to be bothering her today too, maybe a little less though. When she would lay down for a long time then get up it's like her leg was asleep for the first couple steps, then she was okay. We checked her blood surgar again today about 45 mins after eating some dry food and it was 82. She sure didn't seem herself still though.

 

The vet thinks she might have patellar luxation. Her knee caps wiggle around too much basically and cause her bone to temporarily pop out a little, then return. She's a chartreux cat, but from the humane society so not a pure bred or anything, and I've read that this breed can sometimes get this problem. Seems odd how we first just noticed it though.

 

any blood test done? What was her latest sugar level?

 

Yes, they are running her full blood work again. They said her triglyceride levels were high last time along with her blood sugar.

Her blood sugar read 55 at the vet. The day before that we read it to be 82 at home.

It's funny though, I've been looking at pictures of chartruex cats and I had never really heard of them before. Our kitty looks basically 100% identical to the best in show cats I can find pictures of, has all the qualities they list and look for. Maybe she was given up because her mom had knee problems confused_cat