Patricia & Noodle
Member Since 2015
Hello LL! It has been quite a while since I was last active on the board. I see a lot of new faces and a lot of old friends.
To reintroduce Noodle and myself: Noodle was diagnosed with diabetes in January 2015 at ~8 y/o during a severe bout of DKA. She was hospitalized for a time and recovered better than any of us expected she would. We started our dance on Lantus and experienced a roller coaster of high highs and low lows that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. After quite a bit of frustration, we made the switch to Levemir at the end of 2015 and it was the correct choice for her. She is much more stable and her dose has been teeny tiny (we hover around .51mm using calipers) for the past few years. It's definitely still needed, but she gets very little.
Her bean
waves has not been great about following TR or even SLGS for quite a while. I was struggling quite a bit personally and because she was doing so well, I stopped tracking so diligently. We still test at every preshot, but spot checks in between are few and far between and my SS has long been ignored. It is certainly not an ideal situation - I cannot recommend it to others! - but her bloodwork has been great, she gets a full senior blood panel 1-2x a year, she rarely has glucose in her urine, and we are happy with how she is doing overall. It was the best choice for us at the time, I could barely keep my head above water and treating her diabetes more aggressively was just not in the cards for me. If I had to generalize, she is typically in the blues, with regular greens and occasional yellows. I will drop her dose accordingly if she goes too low more than once and rarely raise it since I am not tracking closely enough to feel it's safe to do so. We've had a couple issues with UTIs when she's been over stressed - both have been when we moved. The one in 2019 was terrible due to a reaction she had to clavamox that lead to 2+ months of digestive issues.
She is doing very well otherwise, still gets the zoomies at her age, and terrorizes her drooler brother regularly! Her beans got married last year and she even graciously sits with her father to watch a movie now, it only took 7 years of warming up to him.
Of course, there is a new story to tell, sadly. On Tuesday night, I felt a new lump on her lower abdomen. She has always had some fatty deposits in that area that her vet was aware of and has had 2 ultrasounds of her abdomen in the past that weren't concerning (one in 2015, one in September/October 2019). It was more solid and larger than the ones I was used to and seems to have appeared quickly. I like to think I keep a close eye on her and she is in my lap every day for her BG tests (I test on her back paws, so her belly is exposed). I've also had to pick her up off my laptop about 867x a day since I've been working from home the past 6 weeks and only noticed the mass Tuesday, but who knows. I may have not noticed it growing because of the others she has in the area. We went to the vet Wednesday afternoon and are waiting for the cytology to come back. The vet thinks it is most likely a cyst or a mammary tumor. It is the push I've needed to stop being complacent about her diabetes and start tracking it more closely. I can't control the test results, but I can approach whatever treatment she needs more informed about her diabetes and keep that as well managed as I can.
So, if anyone remembers us, hi old friends and a warm hello to all our new friends, too! I do check in even if I haven't posted in ages and have said many a prayer for the GA kitties who helped us so much when our journey was new and scary. Here's to turning over a new leaf.
To reintroduce Noodle and myself: Noodle was diagnosed with diabetes in January 2015 at ~8 y/o during a severe bout of DKA. She was hospitalized for a time and recovered better than any of us expected she would. We started our dance on Lantus and experienced a roller coaster of high highs and low lows that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. After quite a bit of frustration, we made the switch to Levemir at the end of 2015 and it was the correct choice for her. She is much more stable and her dose has been teeny tiny (we hover around .51mm using calipers) for the past few years. It's definitely still needed, but she gets very little.
Her bean
waves has not been great about following TR or even SLGS for quite a while. I was struggling quite a bit personally and because she was doing so well, I stopped tracking so diligently. We still test at every preshot, but spot checks in between are few and far between and my SS has long been ignored. It is certainly not an ideal situation - I cannot recommend it to others! - but her bloodwork has been great, she gets a full senior blood panel 1-2x a year, she rarely has glucose in her urine, and we are happy with how she is doing overall. It was the best choice for us at the time, I could barely keep my head above water and treating her diabetes more aggressively was just not in the cards for me. If I had to generalize, she is typically in the blues, with regular greens and occasional yellows. I will drop her dose accordingly if she goes too low more than once and rarely raise it since I am not tracking closely enough to feel it's safe to do so. We've had a couple issues with UTIs when she's been over stressed - both have been when we moved. The one in 2019 was terrible due to a reaction she had to clavamox that lead to 2+ months of digestive issues. She is doing very well otherwise, still gets the zoomies at her age, and terrorizes her drooler brother regularly! Her beans got married last year and she even graciously sits with her father to watch a movie now, it only took 7 years of warming up to him.
Of course, there is a new story to tell, sadly. On Tuesday night, I felt a new lump on her lower abdomen. She has always had some fatty deposits in that area that her vet was aware of and has had 2 ultrasounds of her abdomen in the past that weren't concerning (one in 2015, one in September/October 2019). It was more solid and larger than the ones I was used to and seems to have appeared quickly. I like to think I keep a close eye on her and she is in my lap every day for her BG tests (I test on her back paws, so her belly is exposed). I've also had to pick her up off my laptop about 867x a day since I've been working from home the past 6 weeks and only noticed the mass Tuesday, but who knows. I may have not noticed it growing because of the others she has in the area. We went to the vet Wednesday afternoon and are waiting for the cytology to come back. The vet thinks it is most likely a cyst or a mammary tumor. It is the push I've needed to stop being complacent about her diabetes and start tracking it more closely. I can't control the test results, but I can approach whatever treatment she needs more informed about her diabetes and keep that as well managed as I can.
So, if anyone remembers us, hi old friends and a warm hello to all our new friends, too! I do check in even if I haven't posted in ages and have said many a prayer for the GA kitties who helped us so much when our journey was new and scary. Here's to turning over a new leaf.
Pass on some scritches to Noodle from me. We do have a bean who dealt with a mammary tumour a while ago. Tagging 
But DH and I took out the kayaks last week.