Hypoglycemia

It's been an adventure with Pippin the last few days.  His glucose starts out in the morning at 400+ so we give him his 4 units of insulin and then boom.. 4 hours later he is at 40.  Which is a really scary number. We have some emergency instaglucose which didn't raise him as much as I thought it would. He's only gone up 10 points in the last two hours.  But he's going up and that's what is important. I've given him a ton of wet food and he's eaten most of it. I worry so much when things like this happen.  Honestly having a diabetic cat is stressful and I really don't want to have another one. Times like this make me worry because everything I've known so far is wrong.  Meaning ... he's at 400+ so give him the 4 units, then BOOM he's at 40 which makes no sense.  Everything I've been taught about dealing with a diabetic cat is out the door! The way we could tell that he wasn't right yesterday was because he was not steady on his feet, wobbly, walking on his haunches, and basically not normal.  I just hope we get him regulated again. Update to come in later post.

Pippin is almost 16!

My friend recently found out that his cat has diabetes.  I kind of helped him along figuring it out because his cat was just peeing all over his house.  I told him there has to be something wrong, they don't just do that. So I brought over my glucose reader and sure enough.. the cat's glucose was super high.  This made me look back at this blog and see that I've been updating it a few times a year since 2012!  Wow. Pippin is now 4 months away from 16 years old.  He has really slowed down.  My mom gave us a heated bed that her cat isn't using at Thanksgiving and we brought it home and put a blanket and his bed on it and now he pretty much just stays there all day.  He loves it in his old age.

He had also been seeming to slow down on his eating though, so my husband and I decided to get his teeth cleaned.  I was very nervous about it since he's so old.  I really actually didn't want to do it but knew if the vet wasn't comfortable with doing it then they wouldn't. So I took him in last week and he did well.  His glucose was the worst thing that day.  They told me not to give him a shot in the morning so I didn't, but of course by the time he got there he was at 477.  So the vet gave him a shot and then had to watch him all day.  Otherwise, he had no teeth pulled.  She did say his gums weren't great but that's expected with old age.  The cost was $520!  Getting a pet's teeth cleaned is one of the most expensive things I swear.  And this was WITHOUT any teeth pulled.  We did use Care Credit, which is a credit card you can use for humans or animals that usually has a limited time where you can make payments without interest.  I think usually a vet office's terms are 6 months.  So you have to pay it in 6 months and if you don't you get a huge interest rate on your money.  If you don't have the money you may want to look into this for your pet but be sure you can pay the money back in the time allotted for no interest. My sister right now is struggling with her cat... she really wants to clean her cat's teeth but it's so expensive and she doesn't have the money for it. 

I learned another thing this week that I should've learned years ago but NO vet ever told me.  Apparently, you have to do what is called calibrating to your diabetes glucose reader. UMMMM WHAT!  Why was I never told this before.  My friend who's cat I mentioned above is an RN. So since he just ordered a reader he mentioned to me that readers need to be calibrated to make sure that they are still reading the blood glucose correctly over time.  WHAT THE! I've been using the same reader for like 10 years.  I'm really disappointed no one mentioned this.  I ordered the fluid from Amazon today for my Easy Reader to calibrate it. It was only $9. I'm not sure exactly how to do it yet but I'm sure there are Youtube videos out there plus my friend has done it several times at work so I'm going to have him come over to help me do it.  Anyways... even after having diabetic cats for at least 10 years I am still learning new things. 

Hoping your diabetic cats are doing well