please help me with elvis

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carose

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hello all. my name is carol. my cat Elvis was diagnosed with diabetes on 4/10/10. we started novolin n 3 units 2x dailey on 4/13/10. hew seemed to be doing el until about 2 weeks ago. he stopped eating drinking was vomiting and very lethargic. he was admitted to the vet on tuesday with a bg at 490. the vet kept asking are we giving him his insulin? yes every day at 6 am and 6 pm. we brought him home last friday and thats when i read about home testing. my mother in law has diabetes she is very helpful. we have been testing him for a week and his bg has not been below 350. he is eating hills prescription w/d dry and wet
we have for the last 2 days increased his insulin to 4 units. i am very upset with the vet i feel they did not educate us at for this disease and how to handle it. i went for more dry food today and the first thing out of the girl mouth was "are you goning to put anything on you bill" i said i got paid today i will send a check in on monday then she asked how elvis was doing??? i asked my husband to give the shots saturday maybe i am not doing it right... please help.
 
sorry i also have another question. we are home tesing with Accu Check compact ...the lowest number it said on the meter was 350. is this the correct number for elivs' bg or is there a "formula" to covert from human bg to feline bg.

please help
 
Hi Carol,

We understand exactly how you feel. Everyone on this site was confused and frightened at first. But it sounds as though you are doing lots of things right. The hometesting is fantastic! It will help you keep Elvis safe by not giving him too much or too little insulin. Very few people here use N. It is not a long lasting insulin in most cats and makes it harder to regulate them. We do a primer on N that may help: http://www.felinediabetes.com/phorum5/r ... 241,831241 It will give you more information on how N works and how you can do things to help it work better in Elvis.

One of the things I notice is his diet. We really urge diabetic parents to change to a wet lo carb diet - 8 - 10 % carbs. A vet who is often on this site explains it very well: www.catinfo.org. When we switched Oliver over from dry to wet, his bg levels came down 100 points overnight! You do not have to feed prescription food from the vet. Most of us feed Fancy Feast or Friskies or Wellness. Janet and Binky set up a chart that will give you the carb levels of food: http://www.felinediabetes.com/diabetic-cat-diets.htm

You are educating yourself and that is the best thing you can do for Elvis. Most vets have seen a few diabetic cats. Everyone here has successfully treated their diabetic cat. And we have several hundred posters. You may want to read up on other insulins that are gentler and last longer. Check out the Insulin Support Groups on the main page. There is a support group for the most popular insulins: Lantus, Levemir and PZI.

When I was first here, someone reminded me to BREATHE. It turned out to be great advice. You can do this. We'll help you and Elvis.
 
hi there,
since you are hometesting already (and the number is the number by the way, no conversion for human to feline or anything like that), the first thing I would start with changing is the food. from the food charts found here
http://binkyspage.tripod.com/canfood.html

it looks like the food you are feeding is 37% carbs for the dry and 26% for the wet. tooooooooo high for a diabetic. a diabetic cat is just like a diabetic human, they have to eat a proper diet. so for our kitties we like to aim for under 10% carbs. that alone will change kitty's numbers quite a bit.

the key though is that if you change diet, lowering the carbs, you have to monitor or test him a bit more to keep him safe or what you can do is change the diet to a better one and drop the dose back down and start over. if you change the diet without dropping the dose and the fact that he is getting let's say 8% carbs now instead of the 37%, you could overdose him because his starting glucose level is lower to begin with. make sense?

that's where i would start.

then i'd do some reading on insulin choices because to be quite frank about things, there are easier insulins to deal with and for kitty than humulin. if the diet change doesn't put him in remission i'd look into a longer lasting gentler insulin. (humulin kicks in quick and poops out quick, leaving kitty without insulin for the better part of the day whereas some other insulins don't but we can cover that some more later?)
 
thank you so much for all that info. My husband and i are really pissed at the vet now...why would she give us the hills diet?? we are going to the store in the am to get different food ....if his bg dont come down in a few days i am calling the vet again to change insulin....i will post in the am with info...i am so glad i found this site...since i dont have kids...my pets are my famliy.....
 
just checked elvis....shot at 6 pm checked at 7:30 it was 402 now 9 pm it is 319 this might be his peak time i will check in the am gonna try to check at 10 pm dont know if i will be awake or my husband....thanks guys
 
don't get too pissed at the vet just yet :) sometimes they just don't know. they get very little education on nutrition in school and most of their nutrition education comes from the sales reps that come in and push the prescription foods. yes, theoretically they should take it upon themselves to learn but think about that, if they treat multiple species, that's a lot of learning to keep up on and just really isn't practical. sooooo, don't wring her neck just yet. :)
 
Sounds like you are heading in the right direction, Carol. Be sure to write down the bg levels and the times you give insulin so you can keep track. If you are feeling ambitious, there is a great spreadsheet that a lot of us use that is color coded. It will show you exactly what the insulin is doing/not doing for Elvis: http://felinediabetes.com/FDMB/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16

I agree with Cindy. Lots of people show up here with vets that just aren't up to date on feline diabetes. Our vet wasn't. We love her, but she started Oliver on too high a dose and didn't know about hometesting. But she learned. She now encourages people to hometest. And we will never agree on food. She likes wet food, but wants prescription. We just agree to disagree.

You will need your vet for other things. If I were you, I would see if she is willing to listen and respect what your research shows you.
 
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