you need to be able to decide at the time, and I don't think many base dosing half a day ahead because several factors are always in play.
Gayle,
Kitty has only been on the juice for a couple of weeks, and just saw good numbers for the first time a few days ago. There is no "deciding at the time" or "3 or more plans" at this point. It is far too early to figure anything out for sure. I agree 100% about the "several factors in play". In fact, I think those "other factors" are far more important and controlling over the day to day curves than the food or the insulin shots we give. We like to think we have some degree of control over things, but that is all we will ever have is "some degree". But we do spend a lot of time on "what if" scenerios in PZI. It is extremely educational, and it's what peer review is all about, isn't it? Bouncing ideas off of one another so that everyone learns and is better able to advise in the future. People who have been here for a month or less teach me new things on a daily basis. Everyone on the board, no matter how long they have been here, is able to learn something from every person they talk to every day.
Prozinc/PZI are different, much different from Lantus/Levemir. The Ps do not last as long as the Ls and the Ps also have no shed, making for a less smooth curve as far as I have seen in many cases.
Agree 1000%. The Ps, IMO, are easier to grasp. And then can and do work for 12 hours, and that's all the duration they need on a 12 hour schedule. We don't want overlap if we have a choice in the matter. It makes things more difficult to deal with and understand. The ideal P curve is supposed to look like a smile. As kitty gets better, the smile flattens out. The PS's come down, the dose comes down, the nadir remains safe, in a perfect world. That's our goal. The P's are specifically designed for cats. They are completely different, you are right. And no shed with the Ps. That is why, when a kitty like Ruby who switched to lantus this past week, we advised her bean, Amy to forget the way that Prozinc works, to not "think PZI" when she switched, because they are completely different. Conversely, if someone goes from Ls to Ps, they have to forget everything about how the Ls work or it makes it a lot more difficult to get used to a new differently acting insulin.
Feeding only 2 times a day will create havoc to BG numbers; ask any human diabetic what would happen if they ate only 2times a day.
Very much agree. I fed Bob a small meal at +6 every day that I could fit it into my schedule. Some days that was impossible. Some days it was impossible for me to get any mid-cycle tests. I never bought an auto-feeder or used frozen cubes of food. I did the best I could and checked him and fed him as much as possible without risking losing my job. We just dealt with it as well as we could. And it worked in his case. I am sure that Cathy has the same goals, to test and feed and everything else as much as she can possibly work it into her day to day life. Maybe an auto-feeder, frozen food, middle of the night alarms, whatever it takes that she can manage to fit in. But again, it's only been a month, right? It's probably still somewhat in the "overwhelming" category. We try to advise "one small step at a time".
I don't know how important dose measurement must be for the Ps, but it's pretty important with the Ls, so until you have a constant in place with the dose measuring, it's pretty tough to predict what the numbers may or may not do.
Dose measurement is important with the Ps too. That's why many of the beans use u100 syringes. Using those actually enables P users to be more accurate because of the fact that it's a u40 insulin, and we can make finer adjustments than you can with a u100 insulin in a u100 syringe. Lots of kitties are on mini-doses currently. That's what makes the u100 syringes so important for us. I'm sure Cathy has that on her "wish list" since she's down in the .5 or less dose range.
I never used them because I didn't know I could. But then I never shot a dose that couldn't be measured in .25u increments either. So I just eyeballed them. Had I known it was an option, I would have switched the the u100s right away. I never really asked for dose advice here. Probably because the first time I mentioned dosing and shooting in health, a few people told me I was doing it wrong, without my having asked them what they thought. So I just read and figured it out by myself. Luckily for me and Bob, I was able to do that.
Carl
