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Leo may be my fourth diabetic cat, but I had completely gotten out of the groove of Diabetic Cat Management. Some things I had inadvertently blocked from memory:

1. The lines on U-100 syringes are ridiculously close together. Rather like reading a SKU - but the lines are smaller, closer together and make less sense.

2. Diabetic cats can not stop eating. They will eat anything, even if it is not actually food. Last night, Leo ate a bag of catnip after refusing to believe it did not contain Temptations or some other delicious treat.

3. 28 lbs of used cat litter weighs about 0.75 ton.

4. Whatever unused container you have carefully selected for insulin storage instantly becomes the one container you need for everything you do in the kitchen.

5. A 31 gauge insulin syringe can go right through the plastic cap that protects it, which is why we are all taught not to recap - a lesson we all ignore. Incidentally, that now-dulled and bent syringe that just went through the cap can now also go right through a human finger - like buttah.

6. As painful as a 31 gauge syringe is once embedded in a human finger, it has nothing on a 29 gauge lancet embedded in a human finger.

7. Time spent watching tv with the family, doing laundry or cleaning the house, could be better spent testing your cat's blood glucose. Regardless of what hour it is, you will discover, in hindsight, it is invariably the one time of day that you really needed to know what that number was.

8. You learn to work with percents:
Once experienced, blood glucose testing yields a good blood drop 87% of the time. 11% of the time, you will get no blood when you know there was blood there 2 hours ago. 2% of the time the Sweet Spot will yield a blood bath that would delight the most inefficient crime lab.

9. A diabetic cat's paws are never clean, yet a diabetic yearns for nothing more than to sit on your lap and paw your face with his or her litter-caked foot - in such an adorable manner that you are stuck between running screaming to the bathroom to scrub your face with Clorox and being so overwhelmed with the cuteness that you are paralyzed.

10. The non-diabetic cats in the house can and will become ragingly jealous of the diabetic cat who is "lucky" enough to be getting two shots a day and stabbed in the ear 5 times a day.

Feel free to comment on your own "discoveries" in treating a diabetic cat!