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.
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.