Living with a Diabetic Dog: diabetes

Showing posts with label diabetes. Show all posts

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Have you heard about the bionic pancreas?

Section of pancreas of dog. X 250. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The title of this post sounds like the setup for a punchline, but it's no such thing: it's actually in clinical studies right now, spurred by a father's need to help his Type 1 son. You can read the story on TheDiabetesSite, where there is a petition going to get the FDA to move it up to the top of their review list once it is sent to them. Their goal is 10,000 signatures, and as of right now (12/28/13) they have 4,127. This petition has implications for everyone (humans and animals) with diabetes, since the more pressure that is put on the FDA for expediting new diabetes treatments each time, the better for all of us.

As it stands now, the bionic pancreas is a type 1 treatment and would not be practical for animals, but, as with any new idea, there is no way of knowing where it might lead others in their research and development efforts. I urge you to sign the petition.

TheDiabetesSite.com is part of the Greater Good Network, where users click on a box to help various causes for free. I've had a link to TheAnimalRescueSite.com since I began this blog, and I like to think that I've drawn some people to make clicking part of their daily activities.

And, today there's a bumper crop of related articles for you.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Sushi the Shih Tzu- A Fictional Diabetic Dog

English: Shih Tzu (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

About this time of year I start looking for novels to add to the Christmas shelf on my Nook, and I picked up Antiques Slay Ride by Barbara Allan the other day. It's a 99-cent short story ebook, and it's part of an ongoing series. I can't vouch for the other entries in the series, except to say that Sushi, a diabetic and blind Shih Tzu is one of the recurring characters. It left me wanting more Sushi, which is how I usually feel anyway.

Anyway, it's not great art, but it's about time that somebody thought of including a diabetic dog in a story. If nothing else, it raises awareness, not just about diabetes, but also about daily life in this situation. My one caveat about Sushi's treatment in the story is that her owner seems rather cavalier about giving her treats -- as you know, not a good idea with a diabetic dog.

I'm putting up a list of other Christmas stories I've enjoyed, in the box on the right. I hope your holidays are everything you want them to be.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Diabetes Awareness Month is Here- Diabetes in Animals Needs Some Attention, Too!

English: Prevalence of diabetes worldwide in 2000 (per 1000 inhabitants). World average was 28.23‰. no data less than 7.5 7.5-15 15-22.5 22.5-30 30-37.5 37.5-45 45-52.5 52.5-60 60-67.5 67.5-75 75-82.5 more than 82.5 Note: I interpreted France in the data as including the overseas departments of Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana as they are integral parts of France. China includes the SARs of Hong Kong and Macao. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

November is Diabetes Awareness Month, in case you didn't know that already, and I'm going to give a plug to another website from the Greater Good Network, this time for their Diabetes Site. When you get there, click on the box and let their advertisers pay for it, with the money going to fund diabetes research. If a cure is found, animals will benefit just as humans will, except nobody ever had a human euthanized because he or she was diabetic. Lives are at stake here.

And, check out their online store. Part of every purchase goes to research, too. I do a lot of my Christmas shopping through all of the Greater Good shops.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

What if your diabetic dog is lost?

Space Canine Patrol Agents (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here's an issue I've hardly touched on, and I have to thank the ASPCA for making me think about it. On the Fourth of July, I received an email from them with the headline "What to do if your pet is lost." I remembered when that actually happened to me, with the added complication that my dog was on insulin.

Tony liked to go off on his own, so we were always careful about closing doors and making sure he hadn't been digging under the backyard fence, but sometimes he just managed to slip out (little dogs can get through very small spaces). When he was first diagnosed with diabetes and put on insulin, I worried about this, so I ordered him a new I.D. tag. The front had his name, but underneath that it said "I have diabetes." My name and phone were on the back. I should point out that one of my worries with him getting loose was that the people who found him might want to keep him, since people went crazy over him every time I took him anywhere, so I had already had him microchipped.

Well, one night his new tag was tested. It was about 10PM in early September, and my brother in law Steve wasn't paying attention when he went out to get something from his car. Tony was off to the races. We all went out and searched the neighborhood, without any luck.

You can imagine how happy we were when, right after we got back to the house, the phone rang (with good news). It was a man who lived on the other side of the subdivision (I wish I could remember his name), and he had Tony. Steve (who felt very guilty) volunteered to go get him. It turned out that for some reason only a dog would understand, Tony had gone to the back door of that house and started barking. The man opened the door to see what was going on, and Tony ran in, just as if he owned the place. The man told Steve that he called as soon as he saw the tag that said Tony had diabetes. So, not only did we get Tony back, but we didn't have to spend the whole night worrying, which had happened in the past. And that was a real possibility, according to Steve, who said that when he got there, the children of the house were playing with Tony -- and they were not happy that he had to leave. I can see someone waiting to call until morning, considering it was late.

My advice: get the microchip, but be sure to put the diabetes on the dog's tag. It's a little bit of insurance that might make a difference.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Hey, Dogs are People, too, WebMD!

I've talked about WebMD before, but they sent me an email about a new feature that got me very excited. It's a free online Symptom Checker. What's funny about this is that I got the email because I subscribe to their Healthy Dogs newsletter, and I (naturally) assumed it was for animals. Now that I'm writing that, it does sound like I was kind of nuts for thinking that. Anyway, I'm hoping that they will have this service for dogs sometime soon.
On another WebMD note, their latest newsletter is headlined "Is Your Dog Too Fat?" -- an issue of interest, or it should be-- for all doghumans. There is clearly a connection between excess weight and diabetes (although if you read the research on this, you'll find that nobody is quite sure what that connection means or why it exists), and trust me, you want to eliminate as many risk factors as you can. At any rate, there is a video from their Ask the Veterinarian series, and this is the third question. My own take on the connection (and no, I'm not a veterinarian or a physician), after doing a lot of research on diabetes in both dogs and humans, is that exercise seems to be the real root. If your dog (or you) is overweight AND doesn't get much exercise, you've got a lot more to worry about that those who are overweight and active.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

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.