I did my glucose curves for my two diabetic kitties on sunday. I haven't gotten a chance to do a spreadsheet yet but one of the cats, Frank, had numbers that read like 320, 140, 138, 329. He is 9 yrs old and around 16 pounds(large cat but also overweight). He has been on Prozinc for 3 months and the old vet we were seeing jumped him from 1 to 3 units only 3 weeks in. After reading some things and the help from this site I knew that wasn't the greatest idea. I have a new vet that has been working with me but when I gave her the numbers she said she didn't like the way his BG was still going into the 300s and wanted me to bump him up to 4 units. I don't want to not listen to this vet either but she had previously told me she typically only increases in half doses so I'm concerned again about another drastic change. Is 4 units 2x a day a typical dose of Prozinc or does that seem excessive?
Increasing again...
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Kris & Teasel
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Were those curve numbers from a 3 u dose? They’re not that bad and he’s definitely responding to the insulin. There’s a bit of room for the numbers to go lower. Here, we usually recommend increases of 0.25 u at a time. If you have syringes with half unit marks you can eyeball that.
They were with 3 units. He initially started in the high 500s at diagnosis. I have the 1/2 unit syringes too. I'd be more comfortable increasing it a little at a time also, but I am honestly not sure how to approach telling the vet this appropriately(I had a bad issue with the other vet to the point where she wouldn't speak to me without charging me a phone fee). I had asked this one about the increasing too fast and "missing" the right dose and she said she had not heard of that and the only concern is hypo.
Kris & Teasel
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We all had to struggle with the notion of deviating from our vet’s advice. You have to decide whether you’re willing to try a smaller increase for now and explain to the vet that it’s an experiment and you’ll report the results to her. Trying it for a week should give you useful data.
Rachel
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You could give it a try without asking the vet first...and try it for like a week like Kris said. Then let the vet know that you just wanted to try going a bit slower. It's definitely up to you...I had a hard time going against my vet's advice too. The good news for me was that my vet was down with half unit doses and 0.25 unit doses. We don't want to push you to go against vet's advice, but they tend to know less about FD...partially because they have to know about so many different diseases in so many different species...I don't see how they COULD know enough about just FD unless they choose to be a specialist!
Kris & Teasel
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One reason I think is that syringes don't come with any finer divisions than half unit marks and vets don't think owners can eyeball 0.25 u with any degree of consistency. Well, we can and we do. Another reason is that they can't imagine a dose change less than half a unit doing much to the kitty's BG. There's lots of evidence among us here to prove that it does, including the fact that "fattening" or skinnying" a dose also has an effect for many kitties.
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