Hello to all from Argentina

Hello to everyone in this forum!

My lovely Artemisa (mostly called Arti, pronounced as in Artie Ziff) was diagnosed with diabetes a month ago. She's almost 16 years old and currently lives with my parents. I have moved away but I'm still in the same city.
We had done a routine check up and blood analysis in January and she was fine, but some time ago she started drinking a lot of water so she was taken to the vet and we found she had high blood glucose levels (around 250 at the time). She's quite small but weighted 5.5 kg so the vets told us she has to lose weight.

Since her diagnosis we have been through 10 days of her eating diabetes food and getting worse, since afterwards her BG levels were higher and she didn't want to eat all her daily portion which is worrying as she's a little glutton (might this have been the start of ketoacidosis?); then we started getting twice a day BG measurements and Humulin N injections at the local vet practice; finally consulted with an endocrinologist and started giving her Lantus and also measure BG at home.
Her BG levels are currently VERY high, 400-500 mg/dl in the morning and 300-400 the rest of the day. The specialist told us to start giving her Lantus only ONCE a day. We did 1U for three days, then 2U for 4 days. He told us to raise the dose to 3U tomorrow. She's drinking and peeing A LOT, but otherwise seems to be in a good mood and as active as she's been for the last 3 years, which is not much. When she was receiving Humulin N she was always nervious and wanted to be fed, I suspect her BG might have been too low.. we only measured in the middle of the cycle once when we went to the specialist and it was 86 mg/dl.

The specialist asked us to get an ultrasound and we did but the technician didn't write anything about her pancreas and didn't see her adrenal glands, so we are not sure it will be useful.. He did observe that she has a fatty liver.

As you can see, I'm feeling quite anxious. I want her to feel well.. We live in Argentina so we have less options available here.. for example, there is only one brand of diabetic cat food, which is dry. But we want to do the best for her.
I will gladly accept advice.

Thanks to everyone and nice to meet you!

Brenda (and Arti)

 

Welcome Brenda and Arti! It’s great that you are home testing. It will help if you put your test numbers in our spreadsheet. Here are the instructions to set it up, but if you need help let us know and someone will do it for you
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/fdmb-spreadsheet-instructions.130337/
If you have any questions, please come to the Main Health forum and ask. Hope to see you there!

 

Hi and welcome Brenda and Arti,
Great you are testing the blood sugars and are using Lantus insulin.
Three units once a day is too much and will drop her blood sugar low for the first 12 hours and have her running high for the second 12 hours.
Lantus needs to be given TWICE a day twelve hours apart, not once a day. Cats have a faster metabolism than humans and need to be given insulin twice a day. I would go back to 1 unit twice a day and see how her blood sugar levels are with that dose. Hold the dose for 5 days unless the blood sugar drops too low, in which case you need to lower BOTH the am and pm doses a bit. If that happens post on here and ask for help.
There is no need to use expensive diabetic cat food. The dry is too high for diabetic cats. Do you have any pate type cat foods there which you can buy from the supermarket....such as Fancy Feast or Friskies?
Anything 10% carb or lower is suitable. Have a look at this link.
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/links-to-food-charts.174182/
Ask lots of questions....we are happy to help.
Post over on the main forum where there are more people to help you. Here is the link
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/forums/feline-health-the-main-forum.28/
Bron

 

Welcome!

 

Welcome.
I believe there are a few members from Argentina here who can help with food choices available to you. Also, @Veronica & Babu-chiri has a wealth of knowledge. This introduction section is just that. Please start a post in the Main Health Forum.

 

Hi, welcome!!

Take a big breath because all of this at the beginning seems more complicated that it really is, but you will get the hang of it and Artie will start feeling better once his blood glucose gets to normal numbers again, but it takes time so be patient

As they said is best if your next post are made in the main forum or in your case since you are using Lantus, there is an specific forum for Lantus users (http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/forums/lantus-basaglar-glargine-and-levemir-detemir.9/) there you will find tons of information about this insulin, how you use it and how to give it to Artie and a lot of very experienced people that can help you and not only with diabetes they really are great.

Feel free to ask anything you want or need or even PM (private message me) if you need or prefer to discuss something in particular (I know supplies, food and even vets are not the same in Latin American countries than in the US, Canada or UK ) or in spanish

 

First of all.. thanks to everyone for your replies! I will start up the spreadsheet and include the rest of the info on the signature as I'm seeing you do. Also I will post on the main forum with all the details.

I do have a general question.. maybe I can post it on the main forum too but it's related to a couple of things Bron mentioned. We are now consulting an endocrinologist who has publications on cat diabetes. Therefore, we have been following his recommendations. We only went to see him once (we're coming back next week with the ultrasound result and he's probably ordering a new blood and urine analysis). However, I keep updating him by Whatsapp and he's been telling me how to go on.
Should I stop paying attention and contradicting him? Should we look for another specialist? There are very few pet endocrinolists here and he was recommended the most to us.

For example, I had read online that most cats are given Lantus twice a day before visiting him but he keeps insisting to try once a day for now (it's only been one week since we started the shots). We also asked him about homemade food and he said it's OK to keep using the dry food.

Also, we gave Arti 3 units today in the morning. Her blood glucose did go down from 400 to 250 (about five hours after the shot) but her that's not low either...

 

Lantus is definitely TWICE a day insulin for cats. You need to lower the dose to do that. As I said before start at 1 unit twice a day.
Also dry food is too high in carbs. Even the diabetic dry. If you want to do what’s best for Arti change to wet low carb.
Your endocrinologist is not very up to date with cat diabetes.
See you over on the main forum.

 

This is a hard question, odds are your endocrinologist has mostly treated dogs (that's how he's dealing with Adie) and does not have much experience with cats, but he won't mention that specially if he's well known, it happens a lot in our end of the world, he probably will tell you that what you are seeing with Adie is how normally all cats respond to the treatment which is partially true from his point of view considering he usually treats them like this but is not how it has to be, thing is, it will be pretty hard to find another endocrinologist and he will probably not be very different, treating diabetic cats is kind of new around here as is for what I've heard in Argentina.

But you do need to have a vet at hand in case of emergency or other issues, so you will probably have to assess if he will be willing to accept suggestions and then you can keep working with him or if your regular vet will accept suggestions and will be on board helping you with the treatment using information from here and scientific studies published etc. not just your word or if you can kind of work with either of them not giving them all the details of what you are doing like for example you do change Adie to an appropriate diabetic diet but blame it on her not accepting the prescription one, you do tell him you are shooting twice (after discussing it with him) but you dose considering the protocols used in here and in other parts of the world and so on.

You can start mentioning him that Lantus is dosed twice because among other things Lantus was developed for people and people have a slower metabolism than cats so cat's need it twice a day and there's evidence that that's how it works best , my vet also wanted me to dose Babu once a day specially when we realized he was a microdose cat and I actually tried it (only for 3 days) to show I was willing to cooperate with him and it didn't looked good I showed him the results of the 3 day experiment and he accepted that I go back to the SLGS protocol