Resist This Temptation with Your Diabetic Dog
How’s that for a catchy title? Lol Today we talk about resisting the temptation to micromanage your pup. I can tell you that in the beginning I was obsessed with testing, tracking, worrying ALL THE TIME! Some of that was because for the first 3 months nobody told me that I could home test! I was a complete basket case and I’m sure that I took all the fun out of life for poor Max. Once I got a meter and was able to test, I traded the crazy “helicopter Mom” thing for being obsessed with testing. Don’t get me wrong, in the beginning, you need to test frequently until you figure out the things like how does exercise affect your BG (Blood Glucose) numbers, how many points do you get from each type of treat so you’re ready to treat a hypo event, etc.
Once you start zeroing in on your “perfect dose”, and you know your pup’s patterns, you can back off a bit. That doesn’t mean that you don’t test EVERY fasting number, you do, what it means is that now you can start observing trends as opposed to freaking out and testing 6 times a day, every day. After I got past the “freaked out” phase, I tested every fasting number and a midday number most every day. That’s 3 tests a day, no more unless he was low at fasting and I needed to retest to be sure that it was safe to give him his full dose of insulin or whether I needed to reduce it due to a lower number.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel the same way every day. Some days I’m tired, some days I have tons of energy, some days, my stomach is a bit off, some days my knees hurt. Well, our pups are the same. They don’t feel perfect every day and to expect that their numbers will be bang on consistent from one day to the next is an unreal expectation.
I see it all the time that someone will post and say that my dog had a crazy high fasting number this morning, nothing was different, same food, same exercise, same everything. What do I do?! Well, I would treat it as a “one off” and move on with my day.
Once you have been doing this for a while, you will realize that perfect numbers every day are the things that dreams are made of and don’t often happen in the real world of Canine Diabetes. After a while, you just start looking for trends and patterns. What do I mean by this? I mean that if you have a higher fasting number for a day, note it in your journal and get on with your day. If you have a higher fasting number for two days, make a note in your journal and move on. Now if you have odd fasting numbers for 3 or 4 days, you start to check the usual suspects. Those are:
- When did I open my insulin, is it getting old or getting to the end of the vial?
- Has the weather changed?
- Do I suspect that there may be an infection brewing somewhere? More frequent urination or straining to pee, rubbing their ears, rubbing their eyes?
- Have I moved by injection spot lately?
If you start to see a pattern or a trend, that is the time to address it. Especially if you are seeing lower fasting numbers repeatedly. It is time for a reduction in your insulin dose. Please don’t freak out every time that you have an outlier of a number. Things happen, stress, a little arthritis pain from colder, damper weather, they saw a squirrel or the mailman came by. I think that we all know by now that there are so many things that can affect numbers that striving for perfection, while a lovely goal, is really the impossible dream! You can try to micromanage this disease, but I fear that all it will get you is frustration, frayed nerves and perhaps the need for an adult beverage. So the moral of the story here is to breathe, track your numbers and only react when you see a pattern or a trend.
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Until next time…