Sadness and the Sleep-Purr Cure

It's been awhile, hasn't it? Leo has now been with me almost 5 months. After his diagnosis of acromegaly, we had a flurry of vet appointments, a dental, a change of insulin, and a whole lot of mental strain.

The strain is from the fear I think, I know Leo is going to die of his condition, and I don't know from which disease first. Will his heart fail? Will his kidneys fail? Will he get cancer? It's tremendously scary, and even though I consider myself to be optimistic bordering on the ridiculous, I am also a realist.

Realists don't have a lot of fun treating diseases like this, in my experience. Many times, we realists are trying so hard to be optimistic that we fail to see the writing on the wall until one day when it slaps you upside the head, holding a cold and slimy trout. I remember all the hours agonizing over Oscar's numbers, and the day reality set in. Heart failure is not an illness, it's a death sentence with a very firm deadline.

Back to The Present, Leo is a very healthy cat who happens to have acromegaly. He's got all kinds of classic acro signs, like a big pot belly, which serves to make him look cute and too-well-fed. He needs about 30 times the insulin of a "normal" diabetic cat. He's got a giant head that he likes to push against my arm, headbutting his way into my heart. Startlingly beautiful and wise eyes seem to stare almost into your soul, but it seems his vision is faltering. His big snowshoe feet carry his giant body as he lumbers from comfortable sleep spot to comfortable sleep spot. He likes to go outside at night, because bright light bothers him, and he hides under the bed if the Oceana jets are flying too much and it hurts his ears. He eats like a starving horse, drinks like a thirsty horse and sleeps like a drunken man. What a racket he makes with that snoring!

With all the symptoms around me on a daily basis, forcing me to mind my reality, it was really hard to come to terms with the simplest truth. One day, with the big furry boy laying next to me as I tapped away on my laptop, I heard it: Sleep-purring. It occurred to me that Leo always purrs in his sleep when he lays next to me.

Loud and steady, clear and true. My baby is happy. Does anything else matter?

The Full Moon, and What It Can Do For You

You may have noticed I keep a full moon gadget on my blog. I do this because I now track the full moon very closely. Why? Because the Full Moon is just another thing that drives us diabetic cat moms crazy, of course! Leo threw a really high number this morning, and looked so sad. I hope it's just temporary, and pray it's not the full moon, which is still 4 days away. What does the full moon do?

If you have a cat in your home, you've probably already noticed without realizing it. Cats seem very sensitive to the lunar cycles, and behavioral changes are rampant. One vet tech told me that it seems most prevalent in white or light color cats, but any cat can be affected. For those of us with diabetic cats, we can see many changes generally beginning 1-2 or more days before the Full Moon. Some cats numbers track up, some jump up. Some cats suddenly start having good numbers, only to climb steeply on the day after the Full Moon. Some cats climb the drapes and only come down if you walk by and they feel inclined to scalp you. Other cats hover at the door howling until your neighbors threaten to kill you and your foghorn.

I have compiled a list of tips to help you and your precious diabetic babies through the Full Moon in one piece.

1. Remove all glass articles from the testing area so when you throw your meter, nothing breaks. Also remove knives, guns and pins you might be prompted to stab your eyes out with.

2. Pick up your straight jacket from the cleaners and leave it on the couch for any emergency usage that might transpire. Try it on when you get home to make sure the cleaners didn't shrink it. (Lesson learned the hard way.)

3. Velcro any dogs in your home to the ceiling and duct tape their lips shut. To create a quick but genius toy for the cats, simply tie a string around the dog's tail and affix feathers to the end of it.

4. Have your neighbor come over and draw up insulin so when you see that 987 you are *not* inclined to shoot 70 units.

5. Place a courtesy call to the neighborhood police or sheriff's office and let them know some loud or strange noises might be coming from your home and that it would be nice if they placed a funny-farm ambulance on standby for you. Have a neighbor on alert to pet-sit, just in case.

6. Have a talk with your cats. Discuss evening rules, and how the neighbors will *not* be impressed with howling and screeching. Discuss with them possible ramifications of trying to trip (or in Dan's case, bodyslam) the human will result in an unfortunate trip to the hospital whereupon the cats might starve to death in the 5 hour interim before your return.

7. Take a handful of Tylenol around 5PM. Not alot, maybe 9 or 10. If no Tylenol is available, 9 or 10 Paxil will work slow the onset of any headaches occurring from the CAT-erwauling and BG chaos.

8. As midnight approaches, lock yourself in your bedroom. This is NOT a good time to test BG!! If necessary, use duct tape around the edges of the door to seal out the sounds of your meter calling your name.

I hope these tips will help you survive the full moon tonight. If any other members have handy tips, please affix them to this post so we may collect them for future generations.

Test Feed Shoot Feed Test Feed Shoot Feed..

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!

Crazy Cat Lady - How It All Started

This is Spot, the Ferocious Man Kitty. Spot came to me as a young kitten, a stray who'd taken up residence with a friend of my then-husband and his many dogs. He was his own little man from the day he sauntered into my living room, guarding Jesica from sleep demons and briskly prowling the house day and night protecting all within from vicious bugs, deranged attack beetles and the occasional housefly, which we all know to be quite dangerous.


Spot lived in many houses and many states with us, caring for us during countless moves. He tolerated animals of all kinds, often alerting me to a bird in distress or a kitty needing to be rescued. He did all of this with his very best friend in the world - Miss Sammie Wammie. Sammie and Spot were thick as thieves. They did everything together and God help you if they didn't like you!

Miss Sammie was a beautiful, if slightly dim, white kitten when we adopted her about 6 months after we met Spot. Quite tragically for Spot, Sammie died suddenly of cancer at 15. Just like that, our sweet girl was gone.

A couple months later, I noticed my Man Kitty acting in ways I thought meant he was getting senile. He'd follow a water bowl anywhere, he'd literally wrap himself around a water bowl for hours. He attacked his food so voraciously that I was afraid he would choke on it. He had been having much trouble with chronic ear infections and polyps, and had spinal arthritis, so when these oddnesses starting becoming evident, I felt sad and thought that he was in deep mourning. His coat was unkempt, so unlike the beautiful glossy coat he'd had his whole life. I went to the pet store and bought him a furminator.. and met Niko, very sad and lonely in the shelter's huge dog crate.


Niko was trouble. Big trouble. He was into everything and wanted to be to boss. Spot just wanted his water bowl. I was even sadder because I knew I'd made a mistake thinking Spot would feel better with a friend. He started losing weight. One morning I saw him limping and knew I had to get him some pain pills so I took him to the vet and she ran bloodwork. I was scared, and wondered what she had seen to run bloodwork. Then I got the call.

Spot had diabetes.

*cue cliffhanger music*

Next post: The rest of the story..

New Diabetic Coming!

Soon we will be a 3 cat household again. We are getting a new kitty, currently named Leo. Leo is a diabetic and coming from the great outdoors where a very nice lady was feeding him. It became clear that he was sick, and was diagnosed with diabetes. He looks pretty wiped out, but I know we can spruce this little man right up. I can't wait to see how he turns out!

I'll be picking him up in Atlantic City on the 29th and bringing him home to meet my 2 spoiled babies then. I am sure they will be thrilled.. *cough*

Say Hello to my new boy!