So about that darn cat. He's diabetic again. We've known that for about six weeks now but it took a month to establish that he was just not going to respond to glipizide this time. At least now I've learned that "Hey I'm going to start peeing in weird places" means "I've got diabetes, check my glucose levels", plus I had the glucose meter on hand. All that means I'm about a week into giving him insulin injections. Hard to say what's that's doing for certain. I haven't done a full glucose curve for him (we're supposed to wait two weeks for his blood chemistry to stabilize), but I have been peeking roughly daily. Truth is halfway between his breakfast and his dinner the numbers still seem bad, which probably means I'll need to up his dosage. But then there's the anecdotal side of it - the pee volume is down (locations are still wrong, damnit cat!), and he's definitely more active since the injections started. I hate to read too much into his behavior when it might be just that I'm watching him more carefully, but this really was a matter of the day I gave him the first injection he was considerably more underfoot and playful that day. So maybe the insulin is giving him good numbers for a big chunk of the day, and just at the nadir between injections the numbers are bad again. I'm no expert …
For reasons I don't quite understand, the doctors insist that there's no interaction between any of these diabetes treatments and the Metacam (for his walking). Which I would believe – it's not that I don't trust them – but the thing is that the reason I thought there was an interaction was that they told me there was back in 2009 when all of this diabetes & walking stuff started. As far as I can tell they didn't want to start him on Metacam while he was having diabetes because kidney function is weird in diabetics. But now that we know Metacam is OK with his chemistry it's OK to add the glipizide or the insulin on top of the Metacam - even though they weren't willing to add Metacam on top of glipizide before. Either that or something new is known in 2011 that we didn't know in 2009. I'm not sure which.
At any rate, that's the deal now. He still gets his Metacam syrup every three days and he gets a shot of insulin with every meal. I was dreading that but the truth is that he doesn't notice the needle. He appears to think it's normal for me to pet him after each meal and so he's more than happy to come over and sit with me and get the shot.
Of course, the first time I won't be around at the feeding I'll have to convince Karin that the needle isn't "gross". We'll see how that goes …