Hi, new to all this...

Hi, I'm Sarah, and our cat Max was diagnosed with diabetes last Friday. She had been losing weight and asking for food constantly, and has a sister with inflammation of the bowel, so we thought perhaps that was her issue too.

She's on 3 IU twice a day, we've started home monitoring and I'm looking at changing her diet to raw, so I'll be reading the food threads next.

Cheers

 

Welcome to the message board, the best place you never wanted to be.

There are 4 things you'll need to manage your kitty's diabetes:
- You - without your commitment, the following won't work.
- Home blood glucose monitoring with an inexpensive human glucometer such as the WalMart Relion Confirm or Target Up and Up (the pet ones will break your budget!). This saves you the cost of going to the vet for curves and done regularly, removes the need for a fructosamine test. All of our insulin guidelines use human glucometer numbers for reference.
- Low carb over the counter canned or raw diet, such as many Friskies pates. See Cat Info for more info. If already on insulin, you must be home testing before changing the diet. Food changes should be gradual to avoid GI upsets - 20-25% different food each day until switched. There are 2 low carb, dry, over the counter foods in the US - Evo Cat and Kitten dry found at pet specialty stores and Young Again 0 Carb found online.
- A long-lasting insulin such as ProZinc, Lantus, BCP PZI, or Levemir. No insulin lasts 24 hours in the cat, so giving it every 12 hours is optimal for control.

 

Welcome Sarah and Max! Glad you are home testing because 3 units is a very large starting dose. Do you know what her BG's were at diagnosis? I am asking because when the kitty is at the vets the numbers are elevated due to stress.

Also, with you weaning her off of predisone (saw that in your signature) you could see her number really starting to go down, so realllllly glad you are home testing.

If you post in the Lantus Forum, those peeps can help you with dosing. I just moved there last night from Prozinc, so see you there!

 

Thanks BJM and Bobbie for your welcomes

 

At the vet she had ketones in her urine and the glucose number was above 25 mmol/L (450?)

We've done one curve, and some intermediary readings, but after all my reading on the forums last night we'll start the AMPS, PMPS and a few during the day as well. I'm off to do the AMPS and morning insulin now.