5/1 Oscar amps 250 - dose possibly too high?

[Kelly & Oscar]

So Oscar is the never ending conundrum. We started a new pen on 4/22 and immediately saw a difference in his numbers. We got a lovely cycle on 4/24 - amps 100 +7 183 pmps 125 +5 52. Then the pm cycle of the next day, things started getting wonky. Yesterday morning he had an amps of 363 - and I searched the house to see what he could have possibly gotten into and came up with nothing. He went down to 113 by +8 yesterday, but promptly went back into the 200s last night and this morning.

I am wondering if his body has gone into protection mode after that 52 on 4/24. Should I hold out and see if his body equalizes again? Should I lower the dose to 0.5u and hold it there for a week to let the shed drain and body re-acclimate? My gut is telling me to reduce, but I was wondering if anyone has experienced this before.

 

[Vicky & Gandalf (GA) & Murrlin]

It's very frustrating when a new pen seems to cause a disruption in the good numbers he'd been getting. There's a couple theories about that - the old pen becoming less effective would make one think the dose on the new pen might need to be lowered as it might be stronger. The new pen being more effective because it's fresher is the other theory!

Interesting that I have only seen this with the current pen I'm using, opened in January. He now seems to do well on 1.2U where the previous pen did fine at 1.3U. I've never really attributed a change in numbers to a pen until this one.

My take on this is to do more fine tuning on dose. I see you've done a skinny .5U. His best dose could be anywhere between .5U and .75U from the look of spreadsheet over the past few weeks. To determine where that best dose lies would mean dropping back to .5U, giving it 5 days or so, then raise to fat .5U (probably .6U to be more exact), holding, then raising to skinny .75U (probably between .65U and .7U), etc.

When using doses below 1U it's better to think in percentage change rather than .25U changes, which could very well be too much. From .5U to .75U is a 50% increase! From .5U to .6U is only 20% change. That is much less likely to cause disruption to the cycles you're getting while still producing the desired result, a slight lowering of the overall cycles.

Have you seen Sheila's awesome macro pictures of syringe drops and drop method measuring? http://felinediabetes.com/FDMB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=34424#p360982

 

[Kelly & Oscar]

Those pictures are great! So I guess my skinny 0.5u was really a solid 0.5u, my 0.5u was really a 0.6u, and my fat 0.5u was really a 0.7u. @-)


Oscar's numbers started going wonky when the DH left the dog kibble on the counter for a few hours and proceeded to leave the house ohmygod_smile This was on 4/10. Numbers have been all over the place since then. I used my last pen down til I couldn't draw insulin out anymore - probably 10u left in the pen. Opening the new pen on 4/22 gave us some great numbers again, but within a few days, he was back to the same patterns pre-new pen. We are going down into the blues again today, but I think I may take the dose down to a 0.5u had hold it for around 5 or 6 days like you mentioned and see what happens.

 

[Vicky & Gandalf (GA) & Murrlin]

The eating dog food mishap sounds similar to what happen to Sheila's Beau when he was OTJ. He ate some muffins or something very high carb.

Oscar may need some fine tuning, but it's not quite back to square one or anything.

Glad the pictures helped! It also depends on what syringes you're using too. She uses GNP brand from Hocks. I have found their zero mark to be inconsistent, which is why I use an external measuring device or you can make marks on an index card and line it up on the barrel to help. You need a very finepoint pen to make the marks, but Melissa had luck doing that. Consistency is the key, so however you make the marks or whatever you draw to can be called whatever you want, as long as it's the same each time. So your .5U might be different than mine :lol: