Friday, January 14, 2011

Crazy glucose.. I like you, but you're crazy.


I found this really great post over at Will My Dog Hate Me? about seven myths of canine diabetes. I'm not going to list all of them, because you can click the link to check them out, but one of them stayed with me:

MYTH: It takes only a few months to get the disease under control
...For some dogs, the right fix can be found fairly quickly, but they’re the anomalies. The average time for getting your dog regulated is seven months.

I'm not sure what the source is, but I'm intrigued by this myth because I have never actually found a time line of when I can expect Buzz to be regulated. Before I read this, I felt like a failure. Here we are, a month and some odd days post-diagnosis and his sugar is still out of control.

Take yesterday for example - the night before, his sugar was 411 so I gave him 3 units - perfectly normal for us. In the morning - around 8am - it was 120. I couldn't give him any insulin because his sugar would go too low; however, he had just eaten (and diabetics are hyperglycemic in nature) so I KNEW it would go high. What did I do? Considering we are dealing with keotacidosis and such, I called off work (being a graduate student is great because I can work from home sometimes) and checked his glucose every 2 hours until I could give him insulin - which happened to be 2 hours later. I continued on and did a glucose curve throughout the day (a plus of staying home was this allowed me to FINALLY take down my Christmas tree.. hah) but his sugar only ever went down to 220. 3 hours after that, it spiked back up to 500.

Before reading this myth, yesterday would've been a very stressful day for me. But knowing that it's normal for things like this to happen since Buzz ISN'T regulated, made me feel just a little bit better. So thanks to Edie for posting that. (Edie - I know it's been a while since that post, but do you remember where you got that information?)

1 comment:

  1. Hi, I just saw this post -- sorry not to get back to you earlier.

    I did a story about canine diabetes for Your Dog -- the Tufts Veterinary School newsletter -- and interviewed a LOT of experts. I think I have a pdf of that issue; I'll email it to you if I can find it.

    I agree, that's the one thing that most frustrated me in retrospect; I thought Frankie was an unusually difficult case at the time. Another thing that helped was meeting a pal on Twitter, whose dog Jasmine (I profiled her on my blog took a year and a half to get regulated.

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