Mitzelplik's Mom
Active Member
Hi everyone. Wish I'd found you sooner but better late than never. My 19-yr-old girl, Mitzelplik (Mitz for short) was diagnosed last April. It's been quite an adjustment but she's doing pretty well. I started learning to do home monitoring over the summer but couldn't get comfortable with it so I wasn't checking regularly. In November, the vet did a fructosmine test and said it looked pretty good and not to change anything. Mitz's dose at the time was 1.5 units of Prozinc 2x/day. About a month later, I decided to try the Alphatrak again and got a shock - 571 pre- evening shot! As nerve-wracking as it was for my husband & I to do it, we started checking several times a day that weekend and kept getting high numbers. Gradually adjusted her dose as vet advised over the next few weeks and finally started getting good numbers at 2.5 units. Last week, her high numbers were 250 or less, with lows around 100. I'm very happy with that and also happy that I can now check her on my own. She doesn't like it but is good enough to sit still for me just long enough and loves the head scratches I give her after.
One of the biggest challenges we're having is recurrent urinary tract infections. Took off work 2 days ago when Mitz was distressed and vocalizing more than usual, in and out of her box every few minutes, and had pink urine. She spent a couple hours at the vet and is now on antibiotics and seems to be feeling much better. I however, am trying to recover from the sticker shock once again, and would like to find a way to prevent these repeat infections before I go bankrupt. When I asked a vet tech about it, she just talked about prescription foods, which I'm not interested in. I'm feeding her Wellness canned and Stella & Chewys raw. Started adding a homeopathic tincture for bladder and kidney health since her last UTI a few months ago but it's apparently not working. Hoping someone here might have good advice about other supplements to try. Thanks!
One of the biggest challenges we're having is recurrent urinary tract infections. Took off work 2 days ago when Mitz was distressed and vocalizing more than usual, in and out of her box every few minutes, and had pink urine. She spent a couple hours at the vet and is now on antibiotics and seems to be feeling much better. I however, am trying to recover from the sticker shock once again, and would like to find a way to prevent these repeat infections before I go bankrupt. When I asked a vet tech about it, she just talked about prescription foods, which I'm not interested in. I'm feeding her Wellness canned and Stella & Chewys raw. Started adding a homeopathic tincture for bladder and kidney health since her last UTI a few months ago but it's apparently not working. Hoping someone here might have good advice about other supplements to try. Thanks!
I have poked around on the prozinc forum and I'll definitely post a question on the health forum too.
Do you see a tab at the bottom of your spreadsheet? (It might be named Sheet1 or Numbers.) Right-click on that tab and select Duplicate. That will create a new tab with the duplicated sheet, named something like "Copy of Sheet1"; you can right-click on that tab to rename it "AlphaTrak Color Coding" if you want. Once you've done that, you should see an exact copy of your original sheet. Then you can change the coloring like so: 1) click the cell you want to change (say it's that blue 101 Mitz had on 2/7 and you want to make it green), 2) go up to the menu at the top of the sheet and select Format, 3) select Clear Formatting (which will clear the blue coloring and right-align the number in the cell), 4) click the little "Fill color" icon that looks like a pitcher and choose the correct green. Voilà! (If you're OCD like me, you'll want to center the number in the cell, which you can do with the "Horizontal align" icon, three over from the "Fill color" pitcher.) There's probably a way to automate this, but again, I'm not a spreadsheet guru and this works well enough for me! Let me know if you get stuck.