Hi Heidi!
A couple of things I'm noticing in the past few days:
- if you want Petey to have a chance to go off of insulin, or to become regulated and stop bouncing all over the place, you don't want to back away and reduce the dose when he gives you a blue preshot. Lantus works best at lower numbers. When you shoot lower numbers, Lantus will flatten out the whole cycle, and you might see his numbers turn into a line instead of a curve or a zig-zag. The zig-zag cycles are hard on kitties - most people can see that their cats don't feel good when their blood sugar goes from low to high to low again in a day.
- I want to really, really encourage you to check every cycle and see how low a dose is taking him. Lantus dosing is based upon how low a particular dose takes a cat, and usually that low point is somewhere in between the preshot tests. When you see a preshot in the 90's or the 100's, the first question that arises is "and how low was the cat BEFORE they rose up to that preshot number?" It doesn't need to be at any particular time - catch a test before you go to work, when you walk in the door - it all adds information that makes it safer for us to give you help on dosing. I tell people i see the ss like a jig-saw puzzle. You don't have to have every piece to get the picture, but if you have a sprinkling of pieces throughout the puzzle, you can get a pretty good idea of what the picture looks like. Without knowing how low a dose is taking Petey, it becomes risky for a volunteer (all of us who help people with advice) to suggest dosing for him - no one wants to give advice without being pretty confident of how the current dose is working.
These are hard things for people to wrap their heads around! They seem kind of counter-intuitive, but they are both really important. When Petey is giving you lower preshot numbers, that's like a little gift. It's an opportunity to flatten out his blood sugar and help him feel a lot better. Shooting the full dose into normal blood sugar numbers (50-120) is what we call "shooting low" and it is the path to regulation, and hopefully, a cat's pancreas healing. The caveat is that you can't shoot low and then not monitor - you need to get a +1 and a +2 to make sure he's not diving, then get a mid-cycle test in to see how low he's going. Here is a
post that I wrote to someone else recently explaining how this typically works. I hope it's helpful.
Overall, I'd say that Petey is looking pretty good. I think you're right about the 4.25 being a pretty good dose for him. I'm bringing up these couple of points because I can see that Petey is giving you opportunities to improve his condition and if you are able to take advantage of them, he may make a dramatic change.
By the way, I do always look for you, but there are many other experienced people on here who will be happy to chime in and help you with Petey as well.
It's good to have multiple people's opinion on any cat, that's peer review at its best and will get you the best options on how to help Petey.
Hope you're having a great day!
julie
