? Pockets diagnosed 1 mo. ago, just upped to 4U, dosage thoughts?

Discussion in 'Caninsulin / Vetsulin and N / NPH' started by che, Jul 9, 2022.

  1. che

    che New Member

    Joined:
    Jun 10, 2022
    Hi all!

    Long time listener, first time caller. My cat Pockets was diagnosed about a month ago, had always peed a lot but we never thought much of it as we adopted him as an adult cat. He is neutered, was a stray cat before we took him in (he was too sweet for the streets and we kept taking him to the vet for gross injuries anyway). Super hungry, drinking a lot of water. We noticed the water intake a lot more once we bought a cat fountain.

    Anyways, we test at least AMPS and PMPS, and have run a few glucose curves to make sure he's on track. I've attached a spreadsheet below, although it is not the FDMB one, I hope you will still look and find it readable (my wife works with spreadsheets all day and insisted on making it beautiful / make sense to her, lol). I've attached it below as xlsx and here's the published link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...sAQ7sBj8ASOGLJd32mzIYhnhQEB0dFBG12VMW/pubhtml BTW, we have been taking the readings with the AlphaTrak. I plan on buying a human meter today as upping the dosage makes me paranoid and the alpha strips are stupid expensive.

    Anywho, they ran some blood tests at the vet in June and he had super high blood sugar, thought it'd be a fluke since he loses his mind at the vet, panting and all. But when we got to testing him, BG levels were always high. He also had lost a pound since the last time we took him to the vet. He was 14 lbs at the highest, and even then we could feel his ribs. He's just a weirdly large cat, pretty tall, but never overweight as far as we could tell. We always fed wet food until about March of this year, when we decided we need to save money (just bought a house) and switched to 1 meal of Costco kibble a day and one wet meal. We regret it now!!!!! At least they let me return half of the forty pound bag... been on all wet food, low carb again now since diagnosis on 6/12 (but we started insulin on 6/17, I wanted to see if food alone would make a significant difference. You should be able to see the pre-insulin readings this in the spreadsheet).

    So we started at 2u/2x a day on Vetsulin. This came from a vet we didn't like much and didn't really tell us anything except "do this, here's the stuff." We switched to a better vet who actually showed us how to do injections, etc. and he analyses the glucose curves we send him and has upped the dosage twice. Pockets was on 3u for a week, we sent the curve, and I just started the 4u this morning. Do you think that was appropriate? I kind of want to go back down and see what happens, the readings were high on the latest curve but actually weirdly consistent based on what I've read about vetsulin. I also have this worry that we bought bad insulin at our old vet, like I said they didn't really seem to give a crap about anything and are always a little too busy to really talk to us. The doctor comes in for a second and then we get stuck with some nurses who don't know anything unfortunately. I think now the insulin is probably working, but it's just hard for me to really get these numbers since they stay high.

    AMPS today is not on the spreadsheet yet but it was 433 (9am), and in my paranoia about the 4U I tested 45 minutes later and it was 510 (30 mins after the shot and 45 mins after eating about half her food).

    The new vet also tested for ketones when we first went about 3 weeks ago, and there were none present. I have not done any home testing for it.

    Symptoms still present, drinking a ton of water, peeing a lot. Ravished before meals. Not gaining weight.

    We've changed the food a couple times. We were feeding Tiki but it's too expensive for 2 meals a day, so now we're doing Weruva and Fancy Feast mixed, however it winds up being almost as expensive since our cat is quite large (in a healthy way) and the Weruva has fewer calories. We have to fill the bowl to the brim to meet the cal requirements for a 13 lb cat.

    Hope I've given sufficient context! Thank you so much if you read all this rambling. I was so happy to find this forum after the diagnosis, thank you all for keeping this up and being so helpful. It's been such a comfort to read other forum posts. But I wanted to make my own since a lot I had been reading were for much smaller cats, or large cats that were overweight.

    Should I stick to 3u, or go up to 4 like our vet suggested after looking at the attached spreadsheet?

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...sAQ7sBj8ASOGLJd32mzIYhnhQEB0dFBG12VMW/pubhtml

    (also attached a photo of our sweetie xox)
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Jul 9, 2022
  2. FrostD

    FrostD Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2020
    Replied.over in main forum but I'm also going to copy/paste what you said here since there's more info
     

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