One Thing at a Time with Your Diabetic Dog: Part 1
Today we talk about patience. Not my strong suite. If this disease will teach you anything, it will teach you patience. And it will try your patience to the breaking point. If you don’t practice patience, it will bite you. I speak from personal experience here. I have said many times that you should learn from those that have gone before you; there is no need to make the same mistakes that others have made. If you’re in a group, ask your questions, listen to the answers, and ask the question why. Understanding the nuances of the disease will make you successful.
The danger of asking all of your questions right out of the gate before you understand the fundamentals is that you will want to do everything at once. BIG mistake! We need to take one step at a time, one thing at a time. I’ll say that again, one step at a time, one thing at a time. If you make too many changes at once, you will never know what is working and what isn’t. Makes sense right? Of course it does until you’re in the thick of it and are in a bit of a panic!
What do I mean by learning the fundamentals? Good question. Let’s start with the importance of a schedule. Insulin is a 12 hour medication so it stands to reason that you will need to have a 12 hour schedule in place for insulin to do its job effectively. Look at your life and your own schedule and determine what a good time would be to plan to administer your insulin. Keeping in mind that the sequence of events is to test, feed and then inject.
Those two steps before the injection are very important so maybe backing into the injection time is warranted. By that I mean, if you have a food motivated pup that eats every meal as if it were his/her last, then your “ritual” will be smooth sailing. Now, if you have a picky eater that needs to be begged to eat their food, your “ritual” is going to take quite a bit longer and you’ll need to factor that into your schedule. I did a 7am/7pm schedule which meant that I started at around 6:30 in the morning and in the evening. I gave myself time to prepare the meal (weigh each ingredient of kibble, canned and topper), test, let the boys eat and then inject.
If you have a pup that is prone to vomiting some or all of their food, you will need to leave a little time between feeding and injecting so that you are sure that the food will stay down. My Max was very food motivated and once it went in, it rarely came out so I injected him immediately following his meal. As we discussed in the blog post titled “The Dance between Food and Insulin” you will remember that we want food and insulin to work together so the closer you can inject the insulin to the completion of the meal, the better. We don’t want the food to get too far ahead of the insulin and we never want the insulin to get ahead of the food! That is why we never inject before the meal is eaten.
Now we move on to food. The fundamentals of food are that you need a food that your pup likes well enough to eat it twice a day, every day. You can change your toppers if need be, but the base meal needs to be the same. If you’re like me, when Max was diagnosed, I was told that I HAD to feed a “prescription” food now that he had diabetes. Ok…. Well, I’ve mentioned several times that Max was food motivated, but he wasn’t really a fan of this prescription food. Combine that with the fact he was a Westie and Westies don’t do well with a lot of grains, and it was a disaster. The food that I was “prescribed” was for weight loss and it certainly lived up to its purpose there. Max had already lost weight and continued to do so while on this food. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him to maintain or gain any weight. This couldn’t go on, so I found a different food that was well within the parameters of “Diabetic Friendly” and made a slow transition to that food. This was a true test of my patience because I wanted to just eliminate that food immediately, but that wasn’t what was best for Max.
When you make any change at all, it will cause other things in the equation to change as well. A food change especially, because it takes up to 3 weeks to “settle”. When you make a change, no matter how small, you can’t change anything else in the equation. You must stay the course in every other aspect of treatment. If you change food, injection site, insulin dose and add a supplement and your numbers go wonky, how will you ever know what has caused the wonky numbers?! You won’t…
Food changes are the slowest to settle in, so if you are feeling the need to tweak what you’re doing, you may want to change other things first before you change food. Especially if your pup likes the food that you’re feeding and he/she is eating it consistently. It is likely that if you change your food that you will eventually need to change your insulin dose as most commercial foods have different ingredient ratios. So before changing food, you may want to look at the other parts of the equation before making a change in your food. It takes the longest time to settle in and all other aspects of treatment hinge off of it. Now if your pup hates the food, you need to change it to something else and just prepare yourself for the long haul that ensues!
I had hoped to get this topic covered in one post, but as usual, I got a little wordy, so will continue it in a Part 2…
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Until next time…