Do Lou today

Well after last night I only gave 2U of N I after 3 tries this morning was able to get a reading from his pad and just freaked the meter just said Hi what does that mean he is off the scale I guess??? was able to test urine for ketones again and negative for that. I went bk to what the vets have him and gave him 3.5 after testing him since he must be very high I am so upset I guess I should not have reduced to 2U last night but he just felt so bad all day yesterday :sad:

 

Hi in the meter means it is either over 500 or 600 depending upon the meter.

To help determine the optimal dose, I would check his blood glucose about 4 hours after the shot. Doing a 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and preshot would be better though. N insulin peeks at bout 4 hours for cats.

 

HI does mean it's very high. Please try to get some spot checks today. You may find as I did that the N just doesn't last long enough.

3.5 or even 2U could still be too high or too low of a dose.

If you could check at +2 (2 hours after you gave the shot) and again at +4 or even +3 and +5, you may find the dose knocks your kitty's blood sugar low, like maybe drops it by 200 - 300 points, or it may not move the blood sugar at all.

Let's say it drops the blood sugar to 150 at 2 hours after the shot, then we know the dose is too high because extreme swings in blood sugar, in my experience only, causes Tucker to feel crappy. If at +2 the meter reads 400 then the dose may need adjusting also. But... all of this really depends on you being your cat's advocate and collecting data, hometest and keep hometesting until you see how the kitty is reacting to the insulin. I mentioned this on the other thread,for Tucker the N did not last long, he metabolized it too quickly and spent most of his days going up and down like a roller coaster.

A switch to Lantus, Levemir, PZI or I believe a new insulin called ProZinc should be looked at.

Great job testing the BG this morning.

 

Any time you get a reading that's out of line from what you expect the rule of thumb is to retest immediately. You want to be sure there's not a meter error before you take further action.

 

And if your cat's correct dose was actually, say, 1.5 units (as my cat's was when he was first diagnosed), then you could easily with 2 units have provoked a rebound (especially with N-type insulin) causing a skyrocketing blood glucose in a checkmark shape like this:



Since this is the body's attempt to flood the blood with sugar to avoid brain starvation, it's sometimes a bit of an overreaction and can give a HI reading pretty easily.


Point is, your insulin starts acting in 30 minutes, acts very strongly for the first 4 hours, then stops. To know if you're giving enough or too much you should be testing at shot time, +2, +3, +4, and +5 hours. This will tell you way more than your vet or even we can say.