Can I ask for some suggestions on whether I should be maintaining my cat's dose or lowering or increasing them? I am confused as to what to do based on his readings. History isn't clear, though when I change the dose (1 unit every 12 hours) I either get a rise in his BG midcycle or he gets readings that require skipping a does which then turns around and raises things in the next cycle. Should I stay with the 1 unit and the mid to high readings it gives? Thanks for any help for this!
Looking quite good but I think it’s time to try 1.25 u. You have to eyeball that - easy enough if you have half unit marks on your syringes.
I do have U-100 syringes with half unit markings. I tried the 1.2 dose (using the conversion chart) 9 days ago and it ended up getting me into a corner where I had to skip a dose and then I tried a series of low doses (0.6 and 0.8) because of his readings in the 100's. Which then backfired on me by swinging up again. And kind of panicking me for a while. Can you tell me the theory for raising the dose? And what do I do if it brings his BG below the no shoot readings?
The rule to not shoot below 220 (on an AT2) is only for new folks who aren't consistently able to monitor and get tests. You can shoot below that now, although skipping on that 100 was the right thing to do. If you get a low number, your first step is to stall and retest after about 30 mintues. It looks like you are already doing that. Then you can stall again if you need to, or you can give a reduced dose (also a technique it looks like you've used). The dose has been kind of all over the place the past two weeks. It looks like you've kept it at 1u for the past two days though. You could leave it there tomorrow as well, and assuming nothing unusual happens, you could try sneaking in the dose increase by going to 1.1u first, and then going to 1.2u. Some cats are very sensitive to dose changes and will overreact. Also, consider if Ramon might be getting into any higher carb food or treats. That can cause inconsistency in the numbers, so if he's sneaking some of the dog's food, or getting a high carb treat, those things could be having an impact. Or he could just be bouncy.
Yeah I decided to stick with 1 unit for one more day, though he did go very high at AMPS today (as I noted there it probably has something to do with the nibble of DM dry he had an hour before the testing). He regularly goes on hunger strikes if he cannot get a little DM dry plus I have to leave a little bit out overnight for him because of the panics he goes into. I am starting to get him on more wet and raw food by sprinkling Fortiflora on them but he still only eats a small amount of those. Maybe this is why he bounces? But many of those times he bounces very low or very high all he had been doing for the previous hours was sleeping.
My real question was: why give more insulin when he usually isn't extremely high? Wouldn't I be wanting to drop the dose when he goes into the blues? He seems to be mostly getting yellow at AMPS/PMPS and blues inbetween.
The goal is really to get him into the darker greens rather than blue. Blues are nice, healing numbers, but dark greens are more of the normal, non diabetic cat numbers. Since Ramon is staying in fairly high blues during the cycle and hitting yellows and pinks for preshot, you want to increase the dose in hopes of getting him no higher than yellows preshot and dark greens mid cycle. That way, he can hopefully continue coming down to normal cat numbers.
For kibble addicts it can be helpful to do a very slow transition: a small amount of wet food, that you increase tiny bit by tiny bit, while simultaneously decreasing the kibble tiny bit by tiny bit. Over the course of a couple of weeks, you can make the transition complete. I know from having a kibble addict myself that if I waited until he gave up on the kibble and started eating just the wet food, I would still be waiting (started in 2015 ). It was a process, but I realized once we had made it to a completely wet diet that the whole thing had been harder on me than it had been on him. Cats are masters of getting us to bend to their will, but in love and good conscience I couldn't let him keep eating something that I knew was damaging his organs and making him sick. One thing that helped a lot was having low carb treats - freeze dried chicken, freeze dried salmon, bonito flakes, liver, and on and on. When he cried I could give him one or two treats and some loves and play time to distract him. I don't say any of this as a judgement - I cried plenty when we were making the transition and have not forgotten how hard it was - just to let you know that there are lots and lots of tricks for making it through, and support here if you decide to do it. If you don't want to, that's completely up to you and we will help you with dosing no matter what you decide is best for you and Ramon.
I do appreciate hearing about your experience. He does get some wet and raw food (though he will only eat small amounts of them), but when he stops eating (which is frequently these days) he will not eat those - just DM kibble. Its difficult to wait him out since he will beg and beg and beg for food, refuse all of it (except the DM kibble), then truthfully go on a hunger strike which makes his blood glucose go crazy and meanwhile start attacking my other cats. I am only able to stabilize his eating and BG (so far) by giving in a few times a day to bits of the kibble, which with the 1 unit 2x a day gets us those blue and yellow numbers. For the time being I've had to table the idea of switching up his food further while I slowly try to adjust the insulin. The latter has been challenging too because it always leads to swings in the #'s. I'm thinking I'll try a 1.1 or 1.2 again starting tomorrow and see if I can get a BG reduction without a swing/or bounce. The food issue is going to have to be a very long term, very slow process of change. I can't keep risking him not eating for days like he's been doing. Thanks for the feedback and ideas.
I've been trying very hard to keep him on wet and raw, especially this week. But his numbers are high and wacky. I've also tried upping his dose a little (to 1.1 and then this morning to 1.2. I can;t see that it is improving things. What does anyone else here think of his current numbers and dose?
