Confused about Tasha's numbers (+Vet update)

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stacia

stacia

Member Since 2014
It feels like I've been on this diabetes journey with Tasha for months and it's been less than 2 weeks. Her early numbers were great - we had to keep decreasing to get her injections in. Then her PS numbers were heading up so we increased her slightly. Last Monday, the vet wanted a curve (more on that in a minute) and was freaked I was using u-100 syringes so in part to appease her and in part because it seemed a slight increase was in order, I went from .4 to .5 and did the curve.

Since that day (8/26), you can see all heck has broken loose on her spreadsheet. We had our first 300s. We've had our first 400s. (Granted, yesterday morning was likely because our other cat attacked her 15 minutes before AMPS and she was stressed). Last night's PMPS was "low" compared to recents at 221.

And the vet update? She who insisted originally "go home, no BG monitoring, blindly shoot 2u BID, come back in a week for an in-office curve" has completely changed her tune. "Yay for home monitoring, you're not the norm, congrats on that, but you should never adjust a dose more than once a week so a full week on .5u, then give me a curve and we'll talk." So she's working with us, which is good. Of course I won't be in touch with her now until Tuesday because of the weekend.

But what's UP with Tasha's numbers?
 
Are you still feeding dry?
What kind of food are you feeding.
For the notes in the last column it appears you have changed the amount of feeding and are feeding at before each shot and then some more 3 hours after the PM shot. While it is OK to feed at time like that changing the amount makes it hard to determine what is causing the BG changes and what to do to improve the BGs.

You are gently rolling the ProZinc to mix it before each shot. right?
 
She's getting wet friskies pates only (plus some freeze-dried Halo treats) - we switched her as soon as we got the diabetes diagnosis, before we started insulin. She gets a couple of different flavors but they're all in the 6-9% range.

She's always fed AFTER we do her BG tests so the times in the meals column are a little loose - they're always post-test. For AMPS and PMPS, we feed her while we do her shot as a distraction. It's less that we've changed the amount we give her and more that sometimes she won't eat what's put down or sometimes she gets into the other cat's food when we're trying to do our before-bed routine. We do a just before bed feeding (around PMPS +3) and had been doing a mid-day feeding but gave that one up.

We are rolling the insulin to make sure it's mixed well.

You think the amount of food is varying her numbers that much? The inconsistency is making me really scratch my head.
 
I do not think that large change in BG is due to the change in the amount of canned fed.
How has Tasha been interacting with Ripley lately? You said the fought this morning. Could it be that Tasha BG are being raised by similar stress that you do not see.
 
They've never been good buddies and he's jealous of all this extra attention she's getting now. He also attacks her when he's hungry and he's not happy about the new food arrangement because they were previously both dry food grazers. It's possible he attacked her this morning before we came downstairs and we didn't know. Yesterday, we know for sure.
 
As far as grazing goes, I leave out canned low carb food for mine to graze and it is working out OK for all of them.
 
We've occasionally left their canned food out if they weren't interested in eating it right away. Tasha usually eats hers though. It's Ripley, our civie, who's adamant about the grazing. The other thing is that Tasha's supposed to be gaining weight and he's supposed to be losing it. If we could average them out (she's around 9lbs, he's about 15), they'd be in good shape...

Still not sure if that's why her numbers are swinging all over the place though. She was getting meals at both +5 but we moved the nighttime +5 forward because we moved her shot forward (the beans needed to sleep) and eliminated the mid-day thinking it better in case we couldn't always be here. Usually we are. And we could invest in a couple of timed feeders - they wouldn't break the bank for us.
 
I don't know, Stacia. She might be going lower at night and bouncing up, but I haven't seen any really low numbers. She might need a little more insulin. You could increase the dose in the am and leave the pm dose the same? If you want, you can give a fat .5. To do that pull up a dash more than .5
 
Sue - I thought she was due for an increase. Then tonight's PMPS was 177 (we waited about 20 minutes and then it was 245, which seemed like a huge increase without feeding or other explanation - we had crated the civvie to remove him from the equation) and now at +3, she's at 120. We're giving her some food and heading to bed. It's likely one of us will be awake in a couple of hours to check her (neither of us are great sleepers). And a drop of 100 or 50% seems to kind of be her thing at +3 lately so I'm not too concerned by it. But if she's super high in the morning again, maybe we will go a bit fat on the dose.
 
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