Glucose Reader trouble & new insulin

Well.. we were doing pretty good with our reader till about a month ago or so.  Suddenly we kept getting an error message ER 6 and had to use multiple test strips until finally the reader took a reading. We tried a new battery.. we tried everything to fix it. The vet ended up allowing us to borrow one of theirs for the last curve we did.  We use One Touch Ultra (the first series I think) and it has a life time warranty.  So we did call the company... who I might add was very friendly and sent us a brand new one with new test strips for free. We didn't even have to send the old one back to them! (the picture is the Ultra2 not the one we have but I am too lazy to take a picture of the one we have right now.. ha!)

The vet has changed Merry's insulin. The name of it starts with a B and I am posted this post after we tried it so I don't remember the name. It didn't work on him at all.    The litterbox is like concrete and he is drinking a lot. He switched from Prozinc.  Now he is back on the Prozine and Glipizide pills.  I am not really sure why the vet changed him because he was having good numbers?  I think she was trying to make it cheaper for us but in the end now we are just starting all over and building him back up to 8 units of insulin. Pippin is doing fine but he does get constipation a lot since he's been on the diabetic food. We started him on some stool softeners today to see if that will help.  When he gets constipated he pukes and stops eating.  Till the next update!

Clump litter with diabetic cats= NO!!

So as you know with diabetic cats they pee a lot.  We deiced to try out clump litter thinking that it would make a difference in their litter. We would be able to simply scoop out the pee and keep the litter box a little cleaner.  What a nightmare!  They pee so much and so heavily that it is like straight concrete in the box.  It is like digging out hard chunks of litter.  It takes like 15 minutes to just scoop the boxes each day because now the urine is like a paste that is just stuck to the edges in the box.  It's very very hard.  Plus.. since a diabetic cat pees so much you scoop out a lot and so they I am constantly added litter everyday too.  Plus clump litter is expensive.  $12 almost for the bucket you see above.  We tried this for about a month and it was a lot more work then I thought.  So now we are back to the regular Tidy Cats litter.  Much easier to just scoop that out then to use this clump litter.  Hoping this helps someone out there who is wondering what type of litter to use with their diabetic kitty.


EDIT:  9/30/13  My husband loves the clump litter for their diabetes!  So we do use it actually.  He is the one though who scoops out the box everyday because I think that stuff sucks.. but he loves it!

Edit: 5/22/16  Still using the clump litter.  I have come to really like it for the litter... it just took time to adjust.  I would recommend it now with all the pee that diabetic cats do.