After a week of consistent yellow preshots, Tucker decided to dip into the greens yesterday. We never got to the point of giving him extra carbs, but tracked him all day. Interestingly, he started climbing into the blues in the afternoon and his preshot was hot pink! This morning he is back safely in the yellow zone. He has a vet appointment at noon to have his teeth and mast cells looked at it, just because he was having such unstable numbers for a couple of weeks. Would love to have eyes on his spreadsheet. Another question has come up, indirectly related to diabetes but thought some of you might have experience with this. Our ragdoll Daisy had a bad episode of struvite crystals about a year ago. The vet put her on Science Diet c/d formulae to dissolve them to avoid her needing surgery. She was in quite a bit of discomfort and it only worked about 75% of the way in dissolving them, so he popped her onto c/d STRESS and then they dissolved very quickly. (Never would have guessed she was a stessed cat--she's very chill!) He wants her on the dry food formulae of c/d for life. (She vomits the wet and at $7.50 a day, my husband wasn't happy to have her on the wet c/d anyway.) The vet says that a high quality md dry food is not going to be the cause of her developing diabetes when we mentioned it is 43% carbs. Apparently, this was debated at an Australian vet conference last year where some vets putting a struvite prone cat onto a fully wet diet (with extra water added to the food) and only using a c/d type of food when/if the cat does have an episode of crystals that need to be dissolved vs vets who say it is condition that is best managed with exclusive use of a c/d type of md diet, because the cat will always be susceptible to developing more crystals in their urine. He said that of the large group of vets there not a single one has had c/d lead to diabetes in a patient, including himself. (Daisy has had a recent fully renal and liver panel run and everything came out perfect.) We are just uncertain as to what we should be feeding her as we do not want to risk another cat developing diabetes if we can help it. Your thoughts?
He's bouncing from the nice green streak. Excellent job of testing. Watch him. We don't know how long until that bounce breaks and he will probably come down into green again. Good job of shooting green and monitoring!
I don't know a lot about crystals, sorry. It sound like you don't have many options but to feed her that food. It's dangerous for her to have the crystals, right? And the food helped her. I did look at the ingredients and they, of course, made me cringe (so little protein, so many grains) but what else is there to do? What was she eating before when she got the crystals? Have you tried a raw diet? I cannot remember now what you are feeding Tucker (it's not in your signature). That is super high carb, but if her pancreas can handle it... Good luck at the vet with Tucker, by the way! I hope he gets a good report.
Here's the link to your last post: https://felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/4-18-tucker-pmps-9-7.262162/#post-2939104
Max had crystals and blocked when he was 5. My vet put him on cd also. When he developed chronic pancreatitis my vet said to switch to any wet food which I did and added water. He never blocked again. His wet food was also high carb. I dint know if that contributed to him becoming diabetic. I think it was likely mostly pancreatitis and the hc didn’t help. Tucker might very well break the bounce this cycle. I’d get a +2-3 to see. Nice greens yesterday.
Good luck with Tucker's vet appointment. I've seen a number of kitties start FDMB whose cat was on the C/D diet. So yes, it can contribute to diabetes. My non diabetic was diagnosed with crystals/idiopathic cystitis one week after Neko got her diabetes diagnosis. He didn't want her getting all the attention. He was a semi feral so a stressed cat. His vet put him on C/D. Neko used to push him out of his dish and try to eat it. I got tired of policing the two of them at dinner time so asked the vet what food both could eat. She suggested raw food, with lots of water added. Though after reading the Catinfo website I later realized that any well watered wet food with lower potassium would help. I also put Feliway diffusers where the cats hung out to help keep him more relaxed. You could also add a couple drops of Rescue Remedy for Pets to the water dish. And I added Cosequin to his food to help firm the bladder walls. Once I got the water ratio high enough on his food, he never had any more episodes. Did the vet ever figure out what is causing the crystals? Solving that could help.
The vet decided the crystals that Daisy were due to stress. As soon as he put her on the stress CD diet the crystals dissolved. He’s having us run a Felliway diffuser to help with stress. He said that Hills spends big dollars developing foods that keep animals healthy and they would be in serious trouble if their foods debilitated animals. Their animal scientists developed CD diet to dissolve urine crystals in cats but would have been looking at making sure I didn’t cause other problems. He said that it had been hotly debated between wet diet versus one of the sturite crystal pet foods at a conference last year and Hills was there, as well as other cat food providers including Raw advocates. Statistics of numbers of cats lost to salmonella or other issues from home prepared raw diets in Australia were most concerning but he said not as scary as the stats for prepared raw diets (which apparently are unregulated here). They are trying to get the industry regulated, and the raw advocates says people contamination was a bigger issue than with cats. For Hills CD they were told the carb count doesn’t tell the whole story and were given the breakdown and why it is good for cats. He says he would be extremely interested if anyone has links to studies that showed CD Diet leads to diabetes, pancreatitis, or any other condition that would counter the stats provided by Hills. We may have an answer with what’s up with Tucker. The vet said he had a tooth that is being absorbed and that would mess with his BG. He gave me some algae powder to sprinkle on his food but also scheduled him for a teeth cleaning, probable extraction and he’ll remove any mast cells he find while he is asleep. This will happen in 12 days. As I was leaving tonight he dropped to 5, which is very green. I’ll be testing him through the night.
I add four drops of Bach's Rescue Remedy for pets (it's alcohol-free) to the wet food of a few of my cats. They eat it just fine (of course those three are good eaters in general, not picky.)
