Not new to diabetes but new to posting here

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bbaerwalde

Member Since 2018
Hi everyone! I have an 11 year old male cat named Tangelo who was diagnosed with diabetes this time last year and he was put on 4 units of Lantus twice daily. We took him to the vet recently (maybe 3 weeks ago) and were told he was in remission. Well, either that wasn't the case or his remission was very short lived. He is currently in the ICU at our local emergency vet for high sugar (close to the 500's) and has tested positive for ketones in his urine.

We had him on a grain free wet food (he is currently also being tested for IBS due to grain sensitivity at the vet, something I have suspected for awhile. There will be an ultrasound of his abdomen to rule out any intestinal twists or anything like that) that was working for him for awhile before our regular vet gave us the clear to take him off the insulin completely. A couple weeks later he started crashing. We had to take him to the Emergency room today because he started crying in pain and just sitting in front of the water bowl, staring into it but not drinking.

We are not home testing yet, but plan on starting as soon as we have him home. The vet we have now switched to as of today is saying it is probably best to keep him on the Lantus since he is responding and was surprised our previous regular vet didn't want to try him on a lower dose before just taking him off cold turkey. I'm kicking myself for not getting a specialist opinion since our previous experience with that vet had Tangelo knocking on death's door due to gross negligence when it came to doing curves and such. We would leave him there for about 8 hours for a curve and they would "forget" to feed him. So they were shooting him on no food. I found this out way after the fact. They also apparently haven't kept records for a long time because he has been in and out of there for the last year and, when I requested his records to give to the Emergency Vet the most recent records was when he had his vaccines there...10 years ago.

This whole process has been stressful for us and I can only imagine how our big guy feels. Seeing him this way is heartbreaking, but he is in good hands for now.

Sorry for the long post, but just wanted to introduce myself and our situation. I'm going to try to be active here, and, like I said, start home testing. I feel like Tangelo has a lot of good years left in him, and I would do anything to regulate him and keep him healthy.
 
Welcome! I’m so glad you found a new vet- good riddance to the old one! Hometesting is the best way to manage Tangelos diabetes, so I’m glad you will be starting that when he gets home, which I hope is soon. Please keep us posted and ask any questions you have.
 
Welcome !!

Sorry to hear about what happend to Tangelo, unfortunately some vets confuse a regulated cat ( that is a cat with normal blood glucose levels using insulin) with remission ( which would be a diabetic cat that has normal glucose levels without insulin and is diet controlled) which as your new vet mentioned is usually obtained after regulating him and if his body responds to the treatment slowly reducing the insulin dose till you get almost to a drop before actually not giving any

Hopefully he will be back home soon let us know how he's doing
 
Sharon14 said:
Welcome! I’m so glad you found a new vet- good riddance to the old one! Hometesting is the best way to manage Tangelos diabetes, so I’m glad you will be starting that when he gets home, which I hope is soon. Please keep us posted and ask any questions you have.
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Yeah, we had been bouncing back and forth between a specialist and our regular vet. My fiance's mom highly recommended this vet, and I know he is very thorough and would have never told us to take him off insulin if he thought this would happen. I just think in some cases a specialist is better if you can find one who knows what is going on. I don't want to discredit our previous vet because, even if he is at the same practice as the original vet who made Tangelo tank out so bad the first time, he really has helped a lot of my fiance's mom's cats. Thanks for the welcome! :)

Veronica & Babu-chiri said:
Welcome !!

Sorry to hear about what happened to Tangelo, unfortunately some vets confuse a regulated cat ( that is a cat with normal blood glucose levels using insulin) with remission ( which would be a diabetic cat that has normal glucose levels without insulin and is diet controlled) which as your new vet mentioned is usually obtained after regulating him and if his body responds to the treatment slowly reducing the insulin dose till you get almost to a drop before actually not giving any

Hopefully he will be back home soon let us know how he's doing
Click to expand...

Thanks for the welcome!

What had happened was Tangelo was going hypoglycemic at least 2-3 times per week (doing the confused cat circling, the "drunk cat" walk, ect), so we took him in for a curve. His BG hovered around 32 for quite some time, and the vet had said that it was quite possible he had been going that low for some time and he was used to being dangerously low. He advised us to take him off the insulin immediately and that this was a sign of remission. So we took him off. Fast forward to yesterday, they ran a fructosamine (I think that's what it's called) test and it suggested he had never been out of remission in the first place. Like I said, I don't want to knock on our old vet. I think he made what he thought was the right call and we dropped the ball by not hometesting from the jump of the diagnosis. I guess for some reason I thought that, since he was doing well there was no "point". Now I know otherwise. I am a living example of why anyone with a diabetic cat needs to hometest.

Tangelo is doing much better now, btw. His BG is down to the 300s and he is out of ketoacidosis. While his BG isn't where it needs to be, he is back to eating just a little bit and his ultrasound came back clear with no indication of any kind of infections or cancer that might throw his numbers out of whack. His vitals are on the rise and they are hoping to take him off the insulin drip tomorrow and get him back on his long lasting insulin (Lantus) at a lower dose than before.
 
Hi and welcome to FDMB. You and Tangelo have had quite a rough time, I am so sorry you had to go through that. I was so glad to read that Tangelo is improving and hopefully you will have him home soon.
I'm very glad you are going to be home testing. There are a couple of things you can do now to that will help us help you better going forward.
First is set up a signature. This is Tangelo's pertinent information that will display with each of your posts, (light grey text under a post).
Here's how:
click on your name in the upper right corner of this page
click on "signature" in the menu that drops down
type the following in the box that opens: kitty's name/age/date of diabetes diagnosis/insulin you're using and dosage amount /glucose meter you're using/what (s)he eats/any other meds or health issues (s)he has. You can add your name, and a geographic location (sometimes the time zone matters) Be sure to SAVE when you are finished.
2. Another thing that will help us help you when you start BG testing at home is to set up a spreadsheet like the one we use here. We can all see it and look at it before offering advice:
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/fdmb-spreadsheet-instructions.130337/
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/understanding-the-spreadsheet-grid.156606/
I wish you all the best, and hope that you will allow the members here on the board to be part of the team helping Tangelo to better health and well being. :cat:
 
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