I should follow up on my first post about Heisenberg. And I should post more than once a month, but that's a different topic. The good news is the little bugger is doing fine. The glipizide has made his condition "managed", which is excellent news. Depending on what source you use you hear that "normal" cat glucose levels range from 80 - 170 mg/dL. Our veterinarian told us we wanted to see numbers between 100 - 300 mg/dL for Heisenberg. When he was in for his checkup back in June he had a reading of 411. Now, that may not be accurate because he gets really riled up about going to the vet (they have to sedate him because he gets all hissy and bitey) and stress can elevate the glucose levels but it's obviously above normal. After a few weeks on the glipizide I started taking readings and I haven't seen anything above 267 and he's pretty much dialed in around 250 as an average. He's stopped drinking quarts of water and he's pretty much stopped peeing everywhere (there's an occasional backslide, but it's less than once a week now as opposed to five-six times a DAY this spring), and he seems more alert. The bad news is that he's also developed a symptom known as neuropathy where he has weakness in his back legs and has some trouble walking. It is possible this will heal over time now that we have the diabetes controlled so we're just waiting to see. While we were diagnosing that we established that he also has a couple of discs in his vertebrae that are starting to fuse together - which would cause much the same problems as neuropathy and the normal treatment is steroid and those would conflict with the glipizide. (sigh) So the upshot of all that is that he's probably never really going to walk (or jump) as well as he did as a li'l guy. But still, it doesn't really seem to bother him and we're assured that he's not in any pain because of it so we just keep on trucking. We got a ramp for the laundry room step so he no longer has to jump up and through the cat door. (It needed to be a sturdy ramp because Karin and I use that door all the time, so we got a wheelchair ramp.) I still need to build him a ramp to his cat tray but he can still jump up on a bed from the floor, so for right now he can make it into the tray easily. He needed the ramp for the cat door because of the combination of jumping up the step and through the cat door is a little tricky. I've always assumed we'd need a ramp there eventually for Schrödinger, so it wasn't that big of a deal to put one there and for now he seems OK with all of the other steps and jumps he has to do. So once I get this other ramp built we'll just step back and see how he does.

(Note: The "glazed tuna treats" in the title is a joke. No such treats ever existed.) Well. It's been a hell of a week here. The big news this week should have been going on the "Muir Woods by Moonlight" hike (which was fantastic - I need to process some photos) but unfortunately that has been trumped by the fact that Heisenberg has diabetes. I should hasten to say that … well I can't say it's not a big deal because it is a big deal. But it's a manageable, chronic condition and one that won't really affect his quality of life. Actually to a degree he may come out ahead since he gets to switch to wet food instead of dry and he gets fed more often. But the main point is knowing about it means we can manage it. It was still a hell of a shock though and lead to quite a bit of running about, multiple trips to the vet, new food, new pills, and so forth. We're not injecting him with insulin yet, we may have to in the future. Right now we're starting by giving him glipizide which stimulates insulin production. That's just a pill so it's a bit easier to administer and since it doesn't produce insulin directly it's not quite as risky to his blood chemistry. If he doesn't respond (or respond enough) to the glipizide then we'll have to start in with insulin. And we do need to get a glucometer to measure his blood sugar, although we don't have to do that for a couple of weeks. If he stays on the glipizide then we'd only have to check his sugars occasionally. If he goes to insulin then we'd need to do daily monitoring. According to the internet both the insulin poking and the glucometer sample poking are things the cat doesn't even notice really - we'll see about that I suppose. This also goes a long way to explain why he's been peeing EVERYWHERE and also why the pee is sometimes sticky - he's dumping glucose out that way so he drinks a ton. Hopefully getting the sugar levels under control will mean he stops drinking so damn much and maybe even he'll start peeing in a tray again. (sigh) All in all, not good news, but at least in some ways the other shoe has dropped and we know why he's been acting weird. And in terms of bad health news this isn't too bad. It's a hassle but it's not a threat. Especially since I work at home I can do things like feed him four times a day.