New Member~

[Katie14]

Hi everyone-

I’m so happy to have found this forum!

I am a certified veterinary technician that adopted a diabetic kitty April 2025 when he was surrendered to my clinic. He is an 11yr old orange tabby that we renamed to Raymond. He’s named after Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce because he’s just a sweet baby boy.

He was first diagnosed with diabetes in 2022. Within the first few weeks of his diagnosis he stopped eating and became life threateningly ill with hepatic lipidosis. He required hospitalization and a feeding tube. His family painstakingly fed him through the tube for a week. He promptly pulled out his own feeding tube as soon as he started feeling that tiniest amount better. He went into remission in late 2023.

Fast forward to earlier this year, he was back up in weight to 17 pounds and he was drinking/urinating more. He was diagnosed as diabetic *again* in March 2025. His family was struggling with their own health issues. They both are seniors with mobility challenges and have trouble with fine motor tasks (like using an insulin syringe). He was struggling to get him his insulin regularly. In April, he started to descend into DKA. His family could not go through another intensive ER hospitalization, so they were going to euthanize unless someone would take him. Back in 2022 I had half jokingly offered to take him if treatment became too much for his family to manage. So it was a no brainer, he was coming home with me.

Getting him regulated has been an absolute nightmare, as his diabetes is secondary to chronic pancreatitis+GI inflammation. But I’ll post our journey separately.

Ray currently gets 1U Glargine twice daily, vitamin B12 injections (currently at weekly dosing), and Proviable fiber+probiotic powder daily. He is eating Honest Kitchen Turkey dehydrated food. He gets “soup” 5x a day. Ray is also down to 13.9lbs. A large amount of his weight loss was due to illness, but he’s lost just over 1lb since adoption.

Raymond has been the love of my life since I first met him and I feel so lucky to have him.

 

[Mary & Jude]

Well, the very handsome and cute Raymond is certainly lucky to have found you!! And we're glad to have you both join us on the forum.

Have you created a spreadsheet to track Raymond's numbers? Here is a sticky that offers some guidance about setting up the spreadsheet and your signature. This information is quite beneficial to us and the more experienced members of the group as it shows his progress and offers key information that helps guide decisions, when you have questions: Sticky - New? How You Can Help Us Help You!

Generally speaking, the forum is chock full of information, so poke around, read, and ask questions.

Do you know the carb value of The Honest Kitchen? If not, I'll try to track it down for you. We typically like to feed our sugar babies a LC food, under 10% carbs.

There are people on the forum with a lot of general FD experience, but also experienced with P-itis and GI issues, so that will be especially good for you. Hopefully, they will be able to help get Raymond a bit more regulated. As mentioned earlier, they will want to see his numbers before offering dosing advice, so setting up his spreadsheet and beginning to track his data is important.

I look forward to seeing Raymond improve!!

 

[Lara & Luciole (Lu)]

Lu is waving hi to Raymond, and is smitten by how handsome he is. Lu has the same issues as Raymond, and wants to assure him that having a caring human makes all the difference. And he has that in you, with your kind heart. I can see why you're so in love with him.

 

[Sienne and Gabby (GA)]

Welcome to FDMB!!

I love the first photo of Raymond. It looks like he adores you as much as you love him. And thank you for taking you into your home.

In all likelihood, we may end up providing you with a lot of information you already know given what you do for a living. So, apologies in advance.

The dehydrated Honest Kitchen that you're feeding Raymond is listed as 11% carb on their website. The canned food, when using a carb calculator, is a bit over 4% -- they don't provide information on the carbs for the canned food. We would consider the dry food as medium carb. Most of the members here feed their cat a food that's in the neighborhood of 5% carb. You may also want to be sure that Raymond is getting plenty of water (I'm not sure what your "soup" is) given that the dehydrated food is very low in moisture. The down side of using a food that is over 10% carb is that you are limited to which of the dosing methods we use. This is a link to the dosing methods for glargine. The Tight Regulation (TR) Protocol was developed by a feline veterinary researcher, Jacqui Rand, DVM and Kirsten Roomp and published in a leading veterinary journal. It has a great record of getting cats either tightly regulated or into remission. It does specify that cats need to be on a low carb, canned food (or raw) diet. Start Low Go Slow (SLGS) was developed here. It is not as aggressive of an approach as TR and we use it for all of the insulins that are used to treat feline diabetes. There is a great deal more information both in the sticky notes at the top of the Lantus forum as well as on the Health Links page. (Sorry -- it's an overwhelming amount of information so don't feel compelled to stay up all night reading!)

Please let us know how we can help. This is a great community of people who are devoted to their cats.