Greetings!

May I introduce the beautiful Lulu. She was diagnosed on Friday the 13th March 2015. One week on 1 unit per day of Lantus, the dosage was increased yesterday to 1 unit twice a day. She is also on weekly B12 injections. We are happy to have found this website.

 

Hi and welcome to the forum.

Lantus is a good choice of insulin and should hopefully help to get lulu's blood glucose under control.

On the forum we also recommend that you along with giving a long lasting insulin you also monitor blood glucose levels at home. Is that something you have heard of? Most people here use a human meter. This link will give you mor info
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/hometesting-links-and-tips.287/

May I ask what food you are giving?

 

Thank you so much She is on Purina OM dry, Royal Canin Calorie Control canned and Royal Canin Dental Care dry, all portioned of course. She was previously on Royal Canin Satiety dry along with the other two (she has been on a diet), but her vet changed from Satiety to the OM due to the higher protein levels in the latter. I probably will go with the home monitoring after next week's appointment. I just can't see taking her to the vet every week until we get this stabilized -- she is not a happy girl when I get out the kitty carrier, because she knows where we're headed.

 

I would think that most of those foods will have more carbohydrate then we recommend and in the long term it is advised that you slowly switch over to a low carb wet food ie one that has less than 10% of calories from carbohydrate. As changing this can bring down insulin levels by up to 100 points (and hence the need for so much insulin) we always recommend that you do this once you are hometesting.

http://www.catinfo.org/docs/FoodChartPublic9-22-12.pdf

In addition to being expensive testing blood glucose at the vet will likely give a higher reading as the stress of it can increase a cats level by up to 100 points.

 

Welcome to FDMB.

We strongly advocate home blood glucose testing to keep your cat safe, feeding low carb canned food, and using an insulin known to last about 12 hours in the cat (ex levemir, ProZinc, Lantus, or BCP PZI).

 

Ok, thanks so much for the info. I've always trusted my vet, she's a board certified feline specialist (currently the only one in the province), but I know that every time I drag poor Lulu there, her stress level zooms way up. All my kitties prefer to just stay home (I have 3). I am going to change to canned food, but do want to keep her on a small amount of the Dental Care daily as it does a good job of keeping plaque and tartar at bay. She does not like getting her teeth brushed at all!

 

Please don't change until you are testing first as it really can make a big difference in the amount of insulin needed. When you do change do it slowly over the course of a week or so to avoid upset tummies.

I know what you mean about the dry food but honestly I have read that even one of two tiny bits of dry food can significantly increase blood glucose. If you want to get your cat regulated and possibly off the insulin then the dry will have to go completely.

A species appropriate low carb wet food should be better for the teeth but it is not an area that I know much about. Dr Pierson may cover this more on here website http://www.catinfo.org
otherwise you could ask the question about teeth and wet food over on the main health forum

 

One final link

How to handle hypos-just in case
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/how-to-treat-hypos-they-can-kill-print-this-out.15887/

 

Thanks so much for this info on hypo -- I am very grateful to have found this site, you guys rock!

 

Vet stress may raise the glucose levels 100-180 mg/dL; testing at home gives you numbers that are more accurate.
Changing to a low carb canned food may drop the glucose 100-200 mg/dL and drop the insulin 1-2 units in dose which is why we want you to be testing when you make food changes.

 

Okay, I won't change her food until I get the BG testing equipment, it would be awful if she went into shock

 

Any recommendations for canned food? I'm in Canada. (I have two other feline babies and will probably just put them all on the same food.) By the way, I have to thank you for the excellent information, I've spent hours going through this forum, and am impressed with how much good information is here.

 

Check if you have Fancy Feast Classic pates or Friskies pates. I'm feeding 16, so I'm feeding the Friskies in 5.5 ounce cans. The 13 ounce cans are qualitatively different and the cats don't like those as much.

 

What part of Canada are you in? Waving "Hi and welcome" from B.C. Learning to home test is way cheaper and less stressful than doing it at the vet. My non diabetic cat once tested over 11.1 (200) at the vet and 2.9 (53) at home the next day.

I have a friend whose diabetic cat was going to a board certified feline specialist who kept wanting to feed the veterinary dry food too. They do make money from those food sales and often the vets receive their school training on nutrition from one of the vet food vendors. Regular low carb off the shelf canned or raw food is much better. A lot of the food options in the food chart Sarah (phika29) posted are available in Canada. I feel my crew raw food manufactured here. There are all sorts of options for helping to keep the teeth cleaned other than dry food. As someone once pointed out to me - when have biscotti helped clean your teeth?

 

I'm right next door in Alberta, hi!! I really appreciate all the help, I've been spending some big bucks at the vet and being currently unemployed doesn't help. All 3 of my babies are on Rx diets and I am going to switch them over to the foods recommended on this forum (then I won't have to live on KD ). I'm doing some research on raw food as well.
I've been looking at those tracking charts I'm seeing on this board...are they available in metric? Lulu has a vet appointment on Friday, after that I will start with home testing. She'll be sooo happy as she hates going to the vet (what cat doesn't).

 

If you want to track the blood glucose numbers in a spreadsheet like the rest of us do, there is a World version that uses the metric numbers and dose the automatic conversion to the US numbers. Instructions to get the a spreadsheet going are here.

One of our other members found a blood glucose meter called the Bravo - with much cheaper test strips than most of the others available here. Fortunately I live close to the border and do a little cross border shopping for some supplies. I feed my cats Red Dog/Blue Kat raw food - mostly because it was one of the few that had the As-Fed nutritional values done so I could figure out the percent carbs. There is also a recipe for making your own raw food on the www.catinfo.org site. If you are feeding KD, I presume that means you have a cat with kidney issues? I presume you've been to Tanya's site. We have a number of people here with kitties with both issues, so it is possible to feed the same food to all.

 

Thanks Wendy. I just got back from shopping for test supplies. Also picked up some Fancy Feast canned food, which I`ll start introducing to Lulu soon. The KD I mentioned is just my sad attempt at humour...I was talking about me living on KD (Kraft Dinner).