Hi!

Our cat, Lucien, is a 14-year old domestic shorthair. He was diagnosed... I want to say, in January or so?-- following a course of steroids for what our vet thinks is Irritable Bowel Disease. We struggled for a while to get his sugars controlled, and he lost a lot of weight-- went from about 15 lbs down to 7. He's now taking 4 units of Lantus twice a day, and seems to be stable on that (fingers crossed).

I'm here mostly because we're getting pretty exhausted from keeping up with all his medications and his appetite. It's especially tricky because we're expecting our first kid in October, so we'd really really hope to come to some sort of equilibrium with Lucien before we jump into parenting!

 

Welcome.
Lantus is a good insulin
Most of us here test our cat's blood glucose at home using a human meter. We test before each shot and periodically between shots. We record our reading and other info in a spreadsheet. See:
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/fdmb-spreadsheet-instructions.130337/
What are you feeding? A low-carb canned is best. No reason for a prescription food. Here is a list of commercial low-carb canned

http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/shortcut-shopping-list-all-8-or-less-updated.117688/

Here is a link to home testing blood sugarshttp://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/hometesting-links-and-tips.287/

 

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 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.

 

It sounds like you have many months to get the hang of this. I would encourage you to go over to the Lantus Forum and read all you can in the Stickys at the top of the page. Hopefully, you'll have this all under control soon.