11/17 Portia AMPS 277

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portiarita

Member Since 2013
Good morning LL,
Another gloomy day for me and Portia. Starting off with high-ish AMPS but thats probably from skipping her last dose. Now, Im back on schedule and hopefully can go back to those pretty blues. Hope everyone is having a great morning.


Rita
 
Hi Kim and Rise,
Thanks for the encouragement. Just got back home. Ill take Portia's +6 soon although she tends to dip later in the day around (+8-+10).not sure if this is related to when she eats. Her food is very high in carbs (34%) but cant change at the moment.

Wishing you kitties a good blue day!!

Rita
 
ohmy - i didn't realize she's eating 34% food. is that for the IBD? does she have food allergies? maybe we can help you find a low carb alternative that will work for her. we have cats on here with about every concurrent medical issue imaginable.

she'll get back on track after the skipped shot. your count starts over this morning and you'll want 6 shots of the same dose before we re-evaluate the dose to see if it needs increasing. unless she gets under 50, then we'll decrease it.
 
Just thinking more about Portia's food (i'm a mull-over-things kinda person!) ;-)

Can you tell us a little of the story of how she ended up on that food? is it the canned or dry z/d? what she was eating before that, symptoms and what this is supposed to be addressing (the IBD or pancreatitis?)

Here's a post Marje prepared on pancreatitis: http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=79693

my non-diabetic cat, Anya, had chronic diarrhea when we adopted her as a 6 month old. We tried a few things to resolve the diarrhea (antibiotics, fortiflora, dry food that was supposed to be easy to digest), but nothing seemed to help. the vet said that sometimes when diarrhea's gone too long untreated (while she was at the shelter) the gut can be damaged and it can be permanent.

Then punkin was diagnosed with diabetes 5 months later and I found FDMB. At that point we switched both of them to canned food (fancy feast chicken or turkey and giblets) and anya's diarrhea went away immediately. apparently dry food can be hard on the gut. anyway, that's now been nearly 3 years and she hasn't had any further problems.

The reason i'm bringing all of this up with you is because having her on high carb food and trying to manage her diabetes is like a human diabetic eating cake all day. it's not impossible to just increase the insulin dose to compensate, but the Tight Regulation Protocol prerequisite is that the cat be eating low carb canned food. So if we can help you find an alternative low carb food that she is able to eat successfully, things might be a lot more successful for Portia. If we can't, then we work with it, but if we can, it would be good.
 
If the prescription food is something your vet recommended, you might want to share this clinical roundtable with him/her. This discussion is between experts on pancreatitis. The information on diet is on page 12.

FWIW, they also mention cats with IBD. These vets recommend a novel protein (e.g., duck, venison) diet.
 
Hey Julie and Sienne,
I wrote out this really long reply and it got deleted so heres goes again. Portia's condition is very complicated. She's had chronic pancreatitis for a year and we just havent been able to get a normal fPL. We dont know if she has IBD since the U/S showed no intestinal thickening and her GI panel (cobalamine and folate levels) were normal. But given the chronicity of her pancreatitis, my vet suspects she also has IBD. We've tried different food, IAMS intestinal plus (low residue), Hills vnison and peas and finally switched to Z/d. After switching to z/d, her fPL came down a little (from 45 to 10) and so we thought we finally had it under control but about a month later (this Nov), she became diabetic and around the same time her fPL went back up to 25. So now what??? Since she's on a high carb diet+pred+pancreatits, any one of these could be causing the diabetes. We dint really know if we should change her diet or reduce the pred. Since we thought the diet may have helped her pancreatitis, we decided to taper the pred. Its been about 10 days since we started to reduce her dose and clinically she appears to be doing worse now. Meatloafing a lot, generally lethargic and acting just not right. So we've stopped the pred taper today and are going to keep it at 3.75mg/day (lowered from 5mg/day). I would ideally love to get her off the z/d. Although we did see a decrease in fPL, it went back up so maybe its not helping a whole lot or enough(?). But right now, with the diabetes stuff+ the decrease in pred dose+ worstening of pain/nausea and god knows what else, I dont want to to throw food change into the mix. Its so complicated with her. Members of the feline pancreatitis support group mentioned this relatively new company called Rayne nutritional diets that make custom Rx diets as well as novel protein/limited ingredient diets that Im interested in trying out at some point. They have a kangroo one with is 60% protein, 15% fat and 7% carb (by dry matter) which would be a huge improvement over z/d but Im not sure how good this company is and when is the right time if at all to make the change. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, that would be incredibly helpful.

@Sienne, thanks for sending me the article. Ive shown it to my vet in the past. She's actually pretty up to date on pancreatitis which is great!!!

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to be thorough.

Rita
 
i appreciate your thoroughness! it does sound like you've tried a lot of different options. i'm sorry she's meatloafing - that isn't good.

are you doing the other things that help with pancreatitis? sub-q fluids, pain reliever (bupe) and vit B12? those can make a huge difference.
 
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