Hello

Hi my name is Courtney and I have a newly diagnosed 9 year old female cat. My family is quite large with a husband, 13 year old son, 9 year old son, 9 month old daughter, 3 female cats, and 2 male cats. Allie is the oldest cat at 9 and started the herd. She had four kittens and we kept one male, Feisty. He has two kitties, which are 3 now, Blacky (male) and Littlest (female). Then about 11 months ago a little female kitten showed up at our house and the boys and husband adopted her.

Allie was diagnosed with diabetes about three weeks ago. It's been an emotional roller coaster. We hadn't noticed all the signs, due to how busy we are and that Allie isn't an overly social cat. Looking back it was obvious, but at the time it was just normal Allie to us. She was practically dead looking when I got her into the vet. Due to her not being very social we hadn't realized how skinny she got (6 pounds). I blamed myself and was a real mess at the vet. They were very nice to me and told me she wasn't doing a very good job of telling me something was wrong by always hiding in her spots and not being social. That was normal behavior since we brought her home from the pet store at 10 weeks old. She always had her hiding spots and came out for a token pet here and there and for food.

Anyway, she stayed at the vet for a little over a week while they tried to get her stable. She wasn't eating on her own and was very out of it. I got two updates, in the morning and at closing. They had a lot of trouble getting her stable. We had multiple talks with the boys about how she wasn't getting better and we might have to put her down. Then the next morning my cell would ring and get told she was stable and looking good, so we'd all get our hopes up. By night she was oxygen dependent and we were back to putting her down. This happened twice during the week. There was a lot of crying and blaming ourselves (me). By Friday, fifth day there, we had a second visit with her, and she was eating on her own and showing some liveliness. Then I get the nightly call saying she bottomed out. They believe something else is keeping them from being able to get her blood sugar regulated and they don't have the tools to figure it out. The vet suggested sending her to a 24 hour unit hours away. We couldn't afford that. It tore me up. I gave three kids and down to only one income since I had the baby.

Monday mornings call was Allies doing really good and she gets to come home the next day. Roller coaster! I got all the how to lessons, a bag of wet food, a paper to get the insulin at Walmart, and off we went. She was to get 1.5 units twice a day. She did pretty good the first week. I wasn't overly impressed and my husband not at all. He said the vets were a bunch of idiots that didn't know what they were doing. I took her back in this week on Monday for her curve test. Her numbers were still high over 300 so the vet increased her insulin amount to 2.5 units. The vet showed me on the syringe what that looked like and I froze. Her needle markings were different than mine, I thought in that moment I'd been under dosing her at .5, so the vet said if I'd been giving her too little so start giving her 1.5 and if I'd been giving her the right dose to up it to 2.5.

I got home and my husband and I figured out that each line was 2 units, so I'd been giving her 2 instead of 1.5. Could I do anything right? So the vet said yo up her to 3 since she was still high at 2. Within a few days of getting 3 twice daily I started noticing a change and it wasn't a good change. That's how I found this web site. I don't trust the vet anymore. So now I'm gonna go over to the other thread and ask some questions from people that deal with this every day.

Thanks
Courtney

 

Hi Courtney and Allie. Welcome to fdmb. I have answered you on the health forum

 

They sent you home to do injections and they never gave you a lesson????? Wtf??