Welcome, folks!

If you're here, you probably have a diabetic dog, or you know somebody who has one. I hope that we can help each other deal with the many problems that arise in a situation like this. This is my story:

My friend Tony was born on 11/7/96 and enjoyed fairly good health (he did have an ongoing weight problem and low thyroid) until January of 2006, although I didn't recognize that anything had changed for a couple of months after that. It started with a few small things. He wanted to go outside in the middle of the night a couple of times a week, which was unusual for him, but not unusual enough that I worried about it. Over the next few weeks, the nighttime visits to the backyard became the norm, and I was going to work on 4 or 5 hours sleep. Sleep deprivation is my only explanation for why this went on so long.

In early March, my brother came down from Minnesota for a visit, and one evening we were about to have dinner when Tony came up to me, made sure I was paying attention, and urinated on the carpet. I couldn't write this off to excitement, either, because he has always been the most thoroughly housebroken dog I've ever encountered. If a nine-year-old dog hasn't had an accident in the house since he was a puppy, you know something is wrong when he does.

For the next couple of days I watched him constantly, and now I saw what I had missed. He was drinking a lot more water in the evening, starting about an hour after he ate and continuing even when we went to bed. I suddenly realized that I had been filling the little water bowl in the bedroom almost every day (the big water bowl in the kitchen was also used by 2 very large dogs in addition to Tony, and I couldn't tell that anything had changed there). Well, I had a pretty good idea what this meant. My parents and two of my siblings are diabetic, so I called the vet and made an appointment. I was not surprised when she confirmed my layman's diagnosis, but I was shocked to discover that Tony had lost nearly a third of his body weight -- and I hadn't noticed!

Tony started out on 4 units of Vetsulin once a day; now, three years later, he gets two shots a day, 3 units each. His diabetes has generally been under good control, but he's also been having some of the health problems that often occur in diabetics. I'll talk about that next time.