Susie, Diabetic Cat
Index & Contents 

Susie's Insulin Graphs, 2005

• In some of the graphs there are periods where it looks as though her dosage was constantly cycling by 1/4 unit.  This is simply where I decided to change her daily dosage by 1/4 unit, so that her morning and evening injections were slightly different.

• Variable (whenever I got a sample) - sometimes more than 1 per day, or could be several days between samples.

• If the urine glucose reading fell between 2 of the colours I simply took an average.  If the colour on the stick reached the highest point, I took this as 2% if it took the full 30 seconds.  If it reached 2% more quickly I estimated a higher figure (e.g. I assumed 2.5% if it only took 25 seconds).  Whilst this was only a rough approximation, it illustrated more effectively where Susie's urine glucose was clearly high.

• Jan 2005: fructosamine = 433 µmol/l, about the level that I would expect, near the top end of the "good" range.  This was back with the old lab where all of Susie's fructosamine samples have been measured apart from Sep 2004 (see above).

• Otherwise uneventful.

• Relatively good stability, but with 2 drops in Susie's insulin dosage during this period in response to several zero urine glucose figures just prior to the reductions.

• This coincided with a period when Susie was gradually losing weight and eating less food.

• Further reductions in Susie's insulin dosage in this period, in response to several zero urine glucose figures, and again coinciding with further weight loss.

• The increased frequency of single or short-term reductions illustrates my response to a period when Susie was increasingly ill and far more inconsistent in the amount of food that she was eating.

• This was a difficult period.  By mid November, Susie's weight had dropped to just 4kg, under normal circumstances a healthy weight, but not good when she had remained stable at over 6kg for much of the previous 4 years, and by now her bones of her back, hips and shoulders had become very prominent.

• With increasing illness and eating less and less food, Susie was showing significant problems.  There is more about this on other pages.

• In December, I reduced Susie's insulin dosage to the lowest that I had routinely given her at any time in the last 6 years.

• By the end of 2005, Susie was showing signs of further loss of appetite and weight and sadly this continued until the end of her life in January 2006.