AlphaTrack 3 is the new version of the monitor (2) the vet recommended to me. Uses capillary blood (ear prick) to get a BG read. Chewy sells them without any prescriptions.
So sorry you have no clear cut answers as to what is happening with the kitty!
How is his thyroid? Overactive thyroid was what made our big blobby cat turn skinny quickly. She is now back to her old self after nuking it with radioactive iodine.
thank you. Ii did see the Alpha trak 3 on amazon so I will try that. Havenât had his thyroid checked. This is all so frustrating.
The vet should have ran that test, IMO. The test can be quickly done at the vet or sent to a lab if the vet doesnât have the in house capability. We got our results in less than 24 hours. If the thyroid is in overdrive, the treatment is either pills (daily x2) or a radioactive iodine. The former is cheap but a PItA to administer, and the latter is expensive but is typically curative.
Also, hate to suggest this, but has the vet done an X-ray to rule out any issues that can be detected that way?
They were going to about a month and a half ago when they thought he had asthma. Which he may have. They gave him a steroid shot and said xray was the next step if that didnât work. A week later he started drinking water excessively and loosing weight.
I think it is time for a complete work up. Hate to sound doomsday, but one of my cats that recently passed had developed lung tumors. Her decline was slow at first as cats are masters of hiding their illness, but then the accelerated weight loss and thirst made me grab her and go to the cat urgent care. Thatâs where she got her diagnosis. She rallied a bit after steroids but that did not last.
Hope your sweet kittyâs vet will have answers for you and a solution!
Iâm so sorry. It is so difficult.
I havenât read all replies. Is kitty eating, drinking, and using the litter box? Does she seem happy to see you? Is there any purring at all, any enjoyment of a scratch on the head? Any stretching out and rolling in a sunny spot on the floor?
If the answers are no, I would call an at home pet euthanasia service. I did that with my last cat and it was worth every penny. Iâve lost 3 of my own cats in my adult life. The first kitty should have been put to sleep several months before it finally happened. I regret that so much and I vowed not to do that again.
@BunsenBurner , hugs to you.
Not sure if the above was for me but yes mine is eating, drinking and using the liter box. But drinking excessively! Like at the waterbowl for a good 10 minutes each time. Still lovable as always and purring when he snuggles up to us and loves laying out on the front porch even when itâs 100 degrees outside. But after a few weeks of finally putting weight back on, he is now getting thinner again and again drinking so much water.
Here is a good video showing how this is done. Most cats are ok with ear pricks.
Mine certainly is! I donât bother with warm cloth to get the blood flow going. Just rub the ear well and lance. Only a tiny drop is sufficient. I recommend having a test strip ready inserted into the device but not fully so it is not activated for reading. Sometimes my cat shakes his head so speed can be of the essence. 
I get the blood droplet, shove the strip fully into the meter, wait for it to do the self-check, and quickly measure. You can do this!
Edit, @cgemaj I just saw your post. I hope your kitty is okay.
Great! You did it! Looks on the higher side but not dramatically super high. Is this without insulin?
To do a curve, our vet said we had to take measurements every 2 hours between injections. Ideally, a curve should look like the one in the link here:
I am moving in 3 weeks. How have you all helped settle your cats into a new home?
Any doâs or donâtâs? My cats are outside a lot during the day, but never at night. How do people handle letting them learn about their new outdoor territory? I know it has to be gradual, but weirdly, I canât really remember what I did with my own two cats.
Oh wow⊠ok good to know! So this is without insultin for the past two weeks. We stopped because the levels were so low that it became dangerously low. Vet said to stop. All was great for about a week and now super high. Vet says we are now trying to do insulin once a day. So I gave him about .5 of the insulin and will retest in 2 hours. Once I figured it out it wasnât too bad, but I could not get the blood to draw and then I realized I had to put pressure on the backside of the ear!
This is my fear of if we ever decide to move! My cats like to sit out front on nice days. They donât usually wonder off and usually just sit on the porch
Pricking the ear is not going well at all!!! No blood is coming out. I want to scream but then I donât want to stress him out and spike his blood levels lol
Hugs. It might require a bit of a practice⊠look for areas with bigger capillary blood vessels. It really looks like you are hurting the cat, but to them it is just like a mosquito bite. Also, a better lancing device might help. I use the one that came with my old alphatrack. Set to the max needle length. Hugs again. I so wish pets could tell us what is going on with themâŠ
What kind of cat food do people feed their cats?
We have used Science Diet for a long time (except when we had to do prescription food for diabetics). Before that we used Iamâs.
But is the âpremiumâ food really worth the price? I was surprised by how much each can of Science Diet was, but we are at the end of the prescription food (we euthanized the diabetic in February, but weâve been using the food for our other cat because we did a huge order right before then), and I didnât have time to do any research.
We use dry food (available all the time) and give her wet food roughly every other day.
My diabetic cat refuses to eat the DM food. So he and the rest of the cat herd get fed Fancy Feast chicken pate (lowest carb content as far as wet food goes). However, the last batch of that same food was deemed inedible by all three cats, even the one that eats everything (except the wet DM). Looks like the manufacturer tweaked the recipe. In desperation, I tried a bunch of replacements after finally making them finish that FF food by doctoring it with bacon fat 
The best one according to my cats is the Blue chicken pate. They each get a can twice a day. That is NOT cheap!! Plus a feeder that lets out a portion of the dry DM food that they are OK to nibble on.
Your cat might not like the first replacement food because cats are notoriously conservative, so you might have to try many varieties.
Thanks - our cats ate Science Diet before the DM, so I hope sheâll be OK with it. We will mix gradually.
I will check out the Blue.
I kind of have an irrational bias against Blue Buffalo - Before our diabetic cat had diabetes she had some other issue and the vet suggested we feed her a special Blue Buffalo food with potato bc he thought she might have allergies. It wasnât too long after that we found out she was diabetic.
