6 Tips for Taking Great Care of Your Diabetic Pet

Diabetes: there is probably no other diagnosis in the companion animal world that requires so much of the pet parent. When I make a diagnosis of diabetes in a cat or a dog, the first thing I do is have a serious conversation with the owner to make sure that they are up to the challenge of taking care of a diabetic pet, because not everyone is.

I tell pet parents that they must be capable of giving injections, monitoring blood and urine glucose levels, and making sure that they are home for their pet every 12 hours to feed and administer insulin. Diabetes is probably the most difficult chronic condition we manage in companion animals. But having unregulated or poorly regulated diabetes subjects the animal to a host of complications, so if you’re going to accept the challenge, do so whole-heartedly.

If you’re going to protect your pet against heartworm disease, you can’t give the preventive every other month. If you’re going to treat your pet’s diabetes, be ready to take all the steps your veterinarian recommends to do so.

Become a glucometer ninja

Glucometers that are specific for pets have revolutionized the management and monitoring of diabetic pets, because they allow us to obtain valuable information about how the patient reacts to diet and insulin dosing without bringing them into the veterinarian’s office for repeated testing. Cats are especially sensitive to the effects of a stressful veterinary visit, and it’s quite common to see high blood glucose measurements in non-diabetic cats when a blood sample is obtained in the veterinarian’s office.

Glucometers have gotten really easy to use, and require no more than a tiny drop of blood to make an accurate measurement. Difficult-to-regulate feline diabetics can often benefit from a once- or twice-daily glucose measurement, and it’s not hard to teach them to tolerate a quick prick to the ear margin or paw pad.

Use your senses

Sometimes despite all of the advanced laboratory testing and high tech gadgets we enlist in our fight to regulate diabetes in our pets, our best tools are our five senses. One of the most accurate signs that a diabetic pet is well-regulated is a lack of symptoms of diabetes – increased thirst, increased urination, and increased appetite (often with weight loss). Use your sense of sight and watch your pet closely for these signs.

Get right up in your pet’s face and smell its breath. An animal in diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication of unregulated diabetes, has breath that smells like acetone, which is the main component in most nail polish removers. Using your sense of touch to hold a urine test strip under your pet’s urine stream will also help you detect ketoacidosis, since most test strips measure urine ketones, and their presence in the urine is one of the first signs that your pet is on its way to a crisis.
If you hear your diabetic dog bumping into the furniture or walls, it’s likely an indication that it’s developing cataracts, which are a common follow-on condition to canine diabetes. Dogs with cataracts need to be closely monitored for development of glaucoma, a painful condition involving high pressure inside the eye. And just to round out this discussion of the 5 senses, I’ll remind you that “diabetes mellitus” means essentially “honey sweet urine” in Greek, so so

Somebody at some point in time had to make the ultimate sacrifice and taste diabetic urine to give the disease its name.

Don’t skip the rechecks

Even if you’re closely monitoring your pet at home, and feel that things are going well with respect to keeping diabetes at bay, you still need to take your pet to your veterinarian for routine recheck appointments. Why? Because your veterinarian is trained to pick up on subtle clues that you can miss, such as a tooth root infection that will ultimately complicate blood glucose regulation.