Abby Normal

(The following is a cautionary tale, even though it may seem like a cat lover prattling on about his precious widdle tiddums... which it is.)

My cat is in normal health, but I've been giving her injections of insulin for the past two years. This, as you might suspect, is a dreadful thing to do to anyone, much less a helpless animal. How could this have happened?

To begin with, my precious little ebon heathen ate her way into diabetes by refusing to eat anything but one particular brand of corn-based cat food for the first twelve years of her life. About three months ago, after over a year of daily insulin injections, her health began to fail. She lost weight and became generally incontinent.

After a raft of expensive tests, which confirmed she was generally in good health apart from the normal effects of the diabetes, I took desperate measures and confined her to a large dog crate, away from the other cats. I then tested about every meat-based cat food on her that I could find until I discovered something she liked.

It was 9 Lives. Cheap, crappy old Super Supper, to be exact.

I know that keeping a cat in a dog crate may sound borderline cruel but she thrived in there. It was like her own little apartment with maid and room service. Even when the doors were left wide open she rarely ventured out. She put on weight and was clearly a happier cat.

Throughout this three-month period she was still getting her insulin twice daily, but crashed three times along the way. The third episode was last week and it was severe enough to require a trip to the vet and an emergency glucose drip. Fortunately she pulled through with no ill after-effects. The only thing the vet could suggest was that I keep her off insulin for a week and then have her blood sugar checked again.

The test was today and I'm delighted to report that her blood sugar was within normal levels. There are two possible reasons for this: (1) Three months of a stress-free, all-meat diet jump-started her pancreas, something that's not uncommon in cats. (2) An almost total lack of carbs in her diet allowed any minimal amount of insulin from her withered pancreas to keep her up and running normally. Either way, I'm a happy cat wacko.

The remarkable thing is that when I brought her home from the vet she didn't immediately return to the friendly confines of her cage. She instead took up position in her previous favorite spots around the house, almost as though she understood that the vet had given her the all-clear... and if you knew this little beast like I do that wouldn't surprise you a bit.

=Lefty=