Yuck! I'm sorry you're still not feeling well, hope you kick it all to the curb in time to enjoy the holidays!
Yes, I'm just really confused with all the constant hypos and decreases while trying to wrap my head around the double dip/early onset stuff, exhausting! A couple of the recent cycles on my SS, while technically not hypos, she only stayed above 50 with pretty constant intervention. And I figured the reduction earned yesterday just one cycle after the last was from depot, but the others were spaced out a little more. I haven't seen this type of thing happen, except for with remissions, but I knew that wasn't the same pattern as Asia is having so even more confused. It's just frustrating and exhausting and knowing why she's doing this won't necessarily fix it, but at least I am better prepared of what to expect.
I would love to check out some examples, please. And examples and experiences according to Marje totally work for me! I trust your observations and others who have seen a lot. Where would any of us be without that?
Thanks again, Marje!
Thank you for the wishes. I actually don’t feel bad but just the coughing and laryngitis are driving me bonkers.
Here are two examples of coming down the scale fast and then coming to a screeching halt:
Osha’s SS starting in July....she came down really fast (4.5u to 0.25u) until end of August. When they come down that fast and the depot finally catches up and stabilizes, the dose often has to go way back up to hit another breakthrough.
Lucy’s SS starting in Oct, 2008 went from 3.75u to 1u by the end of Oct. Then she hit a wall and the dose had to go back up to 4.5u before she “snapped” came back down (slower this time) and went OTJ where she remains.
If you click on
Gracie’s SS 2013 tab and scroll to March, you’ll see she got into a long string of really great numbers for several months. I was pretty experienced by then so I did very minor dose adjustments (usually 0.1u at a time). And I worked her curve with food so that she held doses longer. But, it’s with times like these that I think the healing starts, the beta cells ramp up a bit, but then they are too fragile to hold the lower dose and they quit working as well. By Sept, I had her down to 0.5u but had to go back up in dose.
Max’s SS raced off insulin (2.75u end of July to OTJ in Sept) and Dale had a hard time keeping ahead of him. Sadly....he did have cancer. Not every cat that goes OTJ like that has cancer. Often when they “snap” and head towards remission, it’s not quite so dramatic. He went from being unregulated to basically, tightly regulated,
fast. And, not every cat that has cancer has a SS that looks like this. Many of the cats with lymphoma (like Gracie), don’t do this.
And then there are the cats like
Leo who just suddenly snap and do stay in remission and perfectly healthy. He’s one none of us ever thought would go into remission!
I try to distinguish between “low numbers” and “hypos”. While any number in the 40s needs to get our attention and numbers in the 30s or 20s
need action now, I wonder if the reason we don’t see more symptomatic hypos at those numbers is because the human meters read lower on cats. Still....it’s important and we absolutely must take action when we see the numbers drift below 50. Perhaps it is late in the cycle and its a 40 something number but still, we should feed some LC food (unless it is at shot time....then go back and read that info about stalling for 20 mins without food to see if the BG comes up before feeding LC if it doesn’t).
Asia reminds me of Gracie on Lantus although Gracie never got higher than red once or twice. But still....very bouncy and stretches of really nice numbers with reductions earned. It’s one of the reasons I like to stay away from predicting who might or might not go into remission no matter how great (or bad) the SS might look. I strongly believe Gracie was almost a “seasonal diabetic” (my own term that means nothing to anyone but me). She’d always start to look better in the spring through the fall and then crummy during the winter. And I wouldn’t be changing the approach. With hormones, seasons, daylight changes, barometric pressure (yes) etc...all these things affect diabetics. So it isn’t just the insulin we give or the food we feed that affects the BG in most of these kitties. Wish it were that straightforward!!!
What?! 
