Peaks & Valleys ... feline diabetes-style

I’m seriously frustrated with my vet. The cat’s vet, actually.

I took Isabella in for a check-up this week. I dreaded going because her blood glucose numbers have been high lately. Consistently high. I’ve spent the last month tweaking her insulin dose and getting nowhere. But, knowing I had an appointment coming up, I picked a dose and stuck with it for ten days prior to the vet visit. He (the vet) gets twitchy when I move the dose around.

I figured I’d go in, present her log of BG numbers, get scolded for a) tweaking the dose, and b) settling on a dose that’s too low, and then we’d agree to raise the dose and I’d be on my way.

What I had forgotten is that this vet isn’t used to seeing twice-a-day blood glucose numbers mapped out in a bar chart. While I’m able to focus on (and be ashamed by) the overall trend of numbers in the mid-300s, he fixates on the peaks and valleys of day-to-day variation. I see those daily variations reported by other kitty owners on the Feline Diabetes Message Board, so I know it’s not something unusual.

My vet, however, naively assumes that if I fed Isabella a strictly consistent number of calories each day, she’d respond with correspondingly consistent BG numbers. And! He wants me to feed the expensive prescription food (higher in carbs that what I’ve been feeding).

In the interest of decent relations, I’ve decided to compromise. I chose three flavors of grocery-store food. She gets three meals a day, so she will get those same three flavors, in the same order and at the same time, every damn day for the next two weeks. That will keep her calories consistent from day-to-day – both overall and within each insulin cycle. At the end of the trial, I’ll plot out her daily numbers so he can see that the same level of variation crops up even when calories are the same.

Unless, of course, he’s right and she suddenly smoothes out and start showing a predictable response to the insulin. It could happen, but I ain’t betting on it.

And, in the meantime, I’m going to interview other vets. It’s a big town. There’s got to be someone around who can work with a home-testing owner of a diabetic cat.