Off Insulin in just 2 weeks - but now super low BS - HELP!

We really need some help/advise!!!

Our baby girl (Gizmo) was diagnosed on April 3rd... we took her to the vet thinking she had a UTI as she was peeing all over our area rug and was in distress and discomfort, only to find out she didn't have an infection but was in fact diabetic. We went through the process of getting her on 2 units of insulin twice a day and immediately changing her diet. We went from feeding her Iams dry food onto the Purina DM wet/dry food diet (1/2 can wet with 1/4 cup dry a day).

Over the next 10 days, her numbers fluctuated like CRAZY! Ranged from 9.5 - 21.6 ... (I am Canadian, so our numbers are different than what I have seen on this site, so hopefully it makes sense?). We did her curve test on April 14th and she had very low numbers... she even went as low as 3.2!!!. We called our vet and he told us to give her corn syrup, which we did and it brought her back up to safe levels (10.5) a couple hours later she was back down to 4.7, we gave her some more syrup and it brought her all the way up to 14.5.

Within in the next few days her numbers leveled out to around 5.6 - 11 so we stopped giving her insulin as directed by our vet (she has not had a shot since the morning of April 18th). However, by April 22nd she started to fluctuate between 3.6 - 6... then April 23rd she was stuck in the 3 - 4 range. We tried syrup but her numbers wouldn't go up past 4. On Monday, April 24th she was extremely lethargic, weak, and she wouldn't eat so we took her into the Vet and they put her on a IV to try and bring her sugar levels back up. Gizmo HATES the vet and get extremely stressed out. She was giving them a hard time so they had to sedate her to get the IV in. We picked her up several hours later and they said her numbers were up to 16 (hooray!!!)... took her home, she at some DM wet food, seemed to be in okay spirits. The next morning, we checked her blood and BOOM it had dropped back down to 3.1! The lowest it had ever been! She was once again very lethargic and so, so weak (struggled to even walk). We called the vet and he told us because she was so stressed out there last time, we shouldn't bring her to them but should try and bring her levels up ourselves.

Anyways, we are really starting to think its the DM cat food!! We have stopped giving it to her and got her eating the Fancy Feast wet food. We have had her only eating that for a couple of days and we got her numbers up to around 5.5 now. We still feel these numbers are low and would like to see them go higher.

I am writing on here because we have no support or advise coming in from our vet... I think they just don't know what is going on as to why her numbers would be so low while not getting any insulin. Has anyone else experienced this??? Any suggestions on how we can get her sugar levels up?? Isn't this abnormally fast to go into remission and then have super low sugar levels?

 

There's a good chance that she wasn't truly diabetic but high glucose was due to stress, illness, something else happening. Without insulin, she's not having a 'hypo' event but sounds like there may still be something else. I test my non-diabetics every once in a while, some of them normally run in the USA 40's. One of my severe asthma/allergy kitties throws high numbers, even up to 350, when he's in a flair but it goes back down when he's over it. If the vet tested him those days, they would likely say 'diabetic' too but he's not...it's transient. He is on the same low carb diet that Dakota's on...no dry, only canned.

Sounds like Fancy Feast is a better choice for her.

 

Did she have any other labs drawn like a thyroid panel? How is your kitty now?

 

I'm a little confused as to why you would want her numbers higher. Even the 3.1 you got falls into the normal range for a non-diabetic cat (55 in US numbers). And is actually just about perfect. If any vet I went to spiked a cat not on insulin from 55 to 288 (which is the US equivalent of that 16), I'd be hard pushed not to take them out back and shoot them! For a cat that's not on insulin, any number above 2.2 is absolutely fine and normal, and I have occasionally heard of non-diabetics throwing the odd number that's even slightly lower than that.

 

When Nikki went OTJ she also threw low numbers (in the 40s in US readings) and my vet was insisting she had an insulin secreting tumor!

Over the last few years she's routinely run in the mid to high 40's. While she's just a sample size of one, it does seem that some cats run in lower numbers than others....

 

Do you give your allergy kitty insulin or does his body sort itself out? How long did it take you to associate the allergies to the high bg?

 

No I don't give him insulin - his pancreas is working fine, it's just the allergy flare stress that causes his bg to rise. It stays high for 2-3 days then goes back to normal.

In my case, my answer isn't typical by any means - I knew it when it went back down in a couple of days. I've had sugar cats for 6 years and know the transient part happens due to many reasons.