I have significantly less experience caring for diabetic kitties than most of the members here, but I thought I’d offer my 2 cents as someone who struggled a LOT with home testing and only recently figured out how to successfully test every time.
I’m actually not joking that we spent multiple weeks with unsuccessful tries that would leave me crying on the floor.
The biggest game changers for me in no particular order:
1) Massaging my cat’s ear and getting it really warm. Moonie hated the warm rice sock, but I learned that she’d happily tolerate ear massages with my hands. So I warm up my hands in hot water almost until it’s so hot that I can’t stand it anymore. And then I gently and slowly massage her ear especially the tips until her ear and my hand are the same temperature.
2) Using 26g lancet. I felt terrible using a bigger lancet at first but I realized what really stressed Moonie wasn’t the prick but me messing with her ear. So it was way less stressful for us for me to use the bigger lancet and get enough blood in one go. I personally had a lot of trouble freehanding, so I bought 26g pressure activated lancets from Amazon. Over time as her ear learns to bleed better I will experiment with 28g, 30g gauges etc (
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081G4RC4P?tag=felinediabetesfdmb-20). Make sure to hold her ear with a cotton pad on the other side or you might poke yourself through her ear and mess up the test (which happened to me multiple times….)
3) Vaseline on Moonie’s ear before I test. Moonie has black ears and I used to never be able to see the blood before it’d get absorbed back into her ear fur. With the Vaseline the blood drop beads up.
4) Using my finger to scoop up the blood drop on her ear. Moonie would absolutely hate it whenever I’d bring the AlphaTrak strip by her ear and this used to be the worst part for us. But I learned she was totally fine with me quickly scooping it onto my finger and testing from there.
5) Lots of singing and treats and praise. The singing helped calm both my and Moonie’s nerves. I make up silly songs about what a beautiful brave girl Moonie is and how much I love her. It settles us both down and makes it an almost fun bonding experience. I save the highest value treats and only give them to her during testing. Now she will come running to the testing room whenever I call her in. During our testing process I would always praise her and give her treats no matter what, even if the tests were all failures. In the beginning I also limited my attempts to 3x, and then if it didn’t work, I’d wait 30-45 mins and try again. It gave me peace of mind (“it’s just three times, we can both handle it”) and I think also didn’t test Moonie’s patience excessively while I was still learning. The most important thing to me was that testing could become a joyful sustainable part of our daily routine, so on net, I preferred to go slow and not traumatize ourselves while keeping Moonie on a dose that was probably too low. Your experience might be different though, as I’d just gotten Moonie from the shelter and didn’t have that bond with her yet.
Keeping my fingers crossed! It’s so stressful and scary at first but I have no doubt that you and your cat will settle into this routine over time. Please give yourself grace and compassion during this learning process - I wasted a lot of time and energy beating myself up every time I failed, and it was just counterproductive in the end especially because Moonie could sense the stress and would get stressed herself.
