5/26 - Zen - PMPS 72 | +1 108 | +2 95 | +3 66

[Emily R]

Yesterday's thread

Mostly green with a little blue last night! Zen dipped into the low 60's before bed, so we ended up giving him 2 more tsp of L/MC (Low/Medium Carb: Savory Selects at 10%) so he'd stay in a good place while we slept. And it totally worked! And I woke up at about 5 this morning (PM+10) to hear his SureFeed opening, so it sounds like when he woke up in the 60's, he self-corrected with some of the LC I left out overnight.

He was a little low this morning, so I went ahead and popped another 2 tsp of our L/MC into his bowl before we shot. He's not massively interested in eating this morning (probably because he ate a little at 5am), so I'm a little worried (because of course I am) but I want to see if he'll eat on his own when he gets low at onset this morning. We'll see.

 

[Emily R]

Some responses to yesterday's thread after I went to bed last night:

Oh, one more thing: I have microchip feeders from Sure Feed for my two kitties. Ruby used to bully Olive a lot regarding food and it caused a lot of problems: Ruby got chubby and Olive stayed underweight. When Ruby got her diabetes diagnosis I bought the feeders to keep their food separate as I was still feeding Olive kibble at the time and I needed to keep Ruby away from it. It was a bit bumpy at the beginning to get them used to it but now there's no food competition and they are so much more relaxed about eating. They know they can leave food in the bowl and walk away without the other one eating it. Now they both eat the same food but I can control their portions so that Ruby who is a bigger cat gets 6 ounces of food whereas Olive gets 4 ounces per day. This means I can also leave food for them in their bowls and know that only the cat it's intended for is eating it. It's a total gamechanger for a multicat household. You may want to look into it.

We love our SureFeeds, @PerfumedCatMom ! We can't get Queso to eat wet food consistently yet, so we have to keep their food separate. I suspect we're going to get her to switch soon, though, because Zen will totally eat her high-carb dry food puke. (So, SO gross. But so, SO true, and a real problem.) We have the half-bowls and we put ice water in the other side to keep the food fresh overnight. Works fairly well.

Do you ever check the lower Libre numbers with a human meter? I've heard it's good practice. Below 50 on a human meter is the reduction point with TR. If you want, we have people who can help you modify the spreadsheet so that the lime greens don't appear until under 50.

We sure do! First, the vet told us to get an Alpha Trak, so we did. Then we got the Freestyle Libre from the specialist vet. Then I joined the forum and decided to get a human meter. So when he gets low on the Libre (because interstitial is 10 minutes behind and sometimes can lull you into a false sense of security with lower readings when they get high and higher readings when they get low) we always corroborate with an ear prick. And if the ear prick has a drop of blood that's big enough, we also test on the Alpha Trak, and I record it in the "Tracker Comparison" tab on the SS, mostly for my own edification:

I also got sick of looking at the inaccurate formatting in the spreadsheet this morning and fixed it. Feel free to take a peek and confirm I got the ranges right-- I think I did!

Thanks, all! Happy Wednesday!

 

[Emily R]

Just hit the 60's. Going to give him some LC and see if we can surf safely today.

 

[Wendy&Neko]

Zen's looking very good right now! Good job keeping him surfing.

I guess I could figure it out, but be interesting to see another column showing the Libre reading compared to the Lite and the AT. Just me being curious. I think people have found it really comes down to their own meters and not something you can generalize across meters.

 

[Emily R]

Good news-- on some of those, I have the data! (Not all the time-- if we were doing an ear prick, it may have been because he'd just ripped the Libre off, as he occasionally does.) I had considered making a Freestyle Libre column, too. I want to say it's typically *close* to the Freestyle Lite (ear prick), but I'd want to pull the data to support that before I say it definitively.

We surfed most of the day. With the exception of right at onset where his L/MC took effect right around the same time as the insulin, he stayed in the 60's and 70's all day. Looking at how his curve looks, I think that was probably the right call to give him the L/MC because otherwise he would have dipped a little too low and we would have been fighting the current to get him back to a happy place, but always curious if anyone else has thoughts on that. And he ate allll of his DM Pate can this cycle. Hopefully the little break between nadir (1 hour ago) and PM food time (1.5 hours from now) will be enough for him to be hungry. And if not, we'll give him some more L/MC if he dips!

 

[Emily R]

He's being a butthead about eating a second can of DM tonight, so we mixed in some Friskies Salmon pate. It's slightly lower carb than the DM pate (Friskies is 4% and DM is 6%), so I have no doubt we'll need to give him some Savory Selects before bed just like last night. We're also not sure that his stomach will love the salmon (jury is out on whether or not he might be allergic), but his taste buds certainly do. The litterbox will tell us in the morning.

 

[Katherine&Ruby]

Wow, look at Zen go! He's broken through and is looking like he wants to be tightly regulated!!

 

[Liz & Minnie]

Emily...I love your s/s and the tracker comparison. Do you work in IT / database design? I love the columns "source name" and "source species" Oh yes, and nice numbers too (that probably should have come first!!)