? Arya Alvarado

[Mercy]

Arya (16 years old) was diagnosed with diabetes on 4/5. She was started on Lantus on 4/7: 1 unit twice daily. She gets tested before breakfast and dinner using the Alpha Trak 2 glucometer. She was started a low carb diet on 4/6 (fancy feast patte/ classics, friskies chicken patte). I've attached a picture of her chart I made for her BG readings along with insulin doses given. Sometimes her BG drops pretty low but she's alert and happy. Any thoughts on why she may be a once daily insulin kind of cat?

 

[Wendy&Neko]

Hello and welcome. I hope you'll be able to post a picture of your sweet kitty here.

If you haven't already, I would read all of the yellow starred Sticky Notes at the top of this forum. Another good post to read is the How You Can Help Us Help You. If you read anyone else's posts, and as you can see from the reading, we are very focused on numbers here. I am glad you are home testing and feeding low carb food. That is a very good start. As part of the home testing, most of the members here have their blood sugar reading in a common spreadsheet format. The format of the spreadsheet helps us see patterns and helps us help you with dosing. The instructions for the spreadsheet are here. (blue letters are links).

To specifically answer your question, we usually find that once a day shots only works in a very small minority of cats. Because of the effect of the Lantus depot, and the dosing methods we use here, we find it best to give the same dose twice a day, as close to 12 hours apart as you can. For you and Arya, that means a smaller dose than 1 unit would probably work better. Are you using the U-100 insulin syringes with half unit markings for injections? If so, I think I would try giving 0.5 units and see how that goes.