One Thing at a Time with Your Diabetic Dog Pt. 2

In the last post, I covered Schedule and Food, today we move on to the other fundamentals of Canine Diabetes and how only changing one thing at a time is really the only way to manage this disease. So by now you have your schedule figured out and hopefully have a food that your pup will eat happily twice a day, every day so we move on…

Insulin is up next and how we can work with other things in the mix to “tweak” it to be more effective. If you are newly diagnosed, you likely haven’t found your perfect dose quite yet. Hopefully your vet started you in the conservative starting range for your pup’s weight. When starting insulin, the dose is determined by weight, not how high the BG (Blood Glucose) is. Sadly, we often see that when a pup is diagnosed and the numbers are high, the pup is started on too high a dose of insulin. The equation for the conservative starting dose of insulin is as follows:

Weight in KILOs (pounds divided by 2.2) X .25 to .5 units

In the beginning, your numbers will likely run high, so the urge is there to rush to increase insulin. Please don’t succumb to this urge. Increasing too often without giving a dose the proper amount of time to settle will lead to nothing good! Patience is especially important here. I am hoping that you are testing at home so that you can track your progress and make informed decisions about insulin increases. After having been subjected to a vet that had almost no knowledge about this disease (not entirely his fault), and trying to “fast track” my Max, we ended up on too much insulin almost right out of the gate. If you missed the blog post about  Rebound (Somogyi Effect), please go back and read it now to save yourself time, money, energy and to remind yourself that patience is so very important, especially early in this diagnosis.

Injection location is something that you can use to your advantage. Ideally, you want to give your injection in an area that has a good absorption rate. Many people are told to inject in the scruff of the neck. That’s okay if you can’t do it anywhere else, but it has a very slow absorption rate and tends to build scar tissue easily, neither of which is optimal to manage this disease effectively. There are a couple scenarios that injecting in the scruff is preferable, but for the most part, it is not ideal. If you are looking for alternatives, click here to go back and read the blog post about injection sites. Again, if you are going to change where you inject do it when you aren’t in the middle of another change like switching food or adding a new supplement to your routine. One change at a time!

I used injection site to my advantage in that if Max had a higher fasting BG (Blood Glucose), I would move my injection site down his side (off the spine) for better absorption. This got the insulin into his system a bit faster to bring his BG (Blood Glucose) down to counteract the higher fasting number. Then the food and insulin could work together throughout the day. If you are going to change injection sites, don’t change anything else in the mix at the same time! Patience…

So now you want to add a supplement, maybe OcuGlo to promote eye health, or maybe some Milk Thistle for liver support (don’t do this unless it is needed), or a probiotic for gut health, whatever it is, wait until you aren’t going to change anything else. The only way to know if the new addition is working as intended is to make one change at a time.

Exercise… You had put your pup’s daily walks on hold when diagnosed because he/she didn’t seem to be feeling well, so you let the exercise slide. Well now that your pup is feeling better, you’ve decided to add the daily walks back into your routine. That’s great! Please don’t do it when you’re in the middle of another change and always test before and after so you know how the walk affects BG (Blood Glucose). If you had stopped walking, start slowly to get back to where you were before; don’t just take a monster hike after not walking your pup for a while. Don’t forget your meter, treats, Glucose SOS and poop bags (of course). If you want to exercise your pup safely, go back and read the blog post about how to do that  located here.

The best way to know how any change is affecting your pup is to test at home. If you don’t, you will never really know what is going on with your “sugar baby”. You will never really know if he/she is safe at all times if you aren’t testing.

To summarize these last two posts, if you are going to make a change, just one thing at a time. If you go ahead and change multiple things, you won’t know what impact each component had. Also, if you don’t reach the desired result, you won’t know which thing to change back to get you back where you started. Trust me when I say that although you want immediate results, slow and steady is the only way to go when trying to get a grip on a dynamic disease like Canine Diabetes. Save your sanity… Take your time.

Notice that for most of the products, blog posts or groups that I mention, the text is linked to more information. Just click on the colored text (red or blue, depending what device you are on) and it should take you right to the item, post or group. If you have any thoughts or ideas for topics that you’d like to see covered here, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at NancyForPetTest@PharmaSupply.com. As always, please “like” this blog post or any of the others that have helped you or just refreshed your memory. Look for new posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

Until next time…