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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • This is Alice. I got her at the same time as I got Milo, about 12 years ago now. Milo passed way in 2022 and I miss him all the time. He was my buddycat, Alice is my bunnycat. She’s soft, fluffy, sweet, and lazy. She loves a warm spot and a lap to cuddle on, though since she’s about 16 years old now, she can’t really jump up onto things anymore. We also adopted a little lunatic kitten named Chess, and she hates him passionately. We keep her sequestered away from the kitten and the new dog we also adopted, but the little bastard loves her so much and wants nothing more than to be her best friend. He sits on the other side of the door and sings to her all day. She just hisses back. She’s entitled to be crotchety though. Sometimes we take her out and bring her onto the couch and set her up with some lap time and she just curls up in a ball until Chess comes along, at which point she hisses ceaselessly until he goes away.

    Unrequited love, what a sad story.

    This is Chess:






  • Note that this is the older model. There is a Litter Robot 4 now, and it’s much quieter and has additional features like weight tracking.

    I personally think they’re a huge quality of life improvement. When my old model 3 gave up after something like 5 years, I ordered a new one the same day. Scooping is gross and tiresome, and if you like to travel on short notice, this can buy you about 4 days for two cats or 7-8 days for one if you also have an automatic feeder (much cheaper than this) or free feed them. By that point, it’s almost nice to get a sitter just so your cat(s) won’t get lonely while you’re away.

    Yes, it’s expensive. But if you spend 5 minutes a day scooping, that’s about 1800 minutes a year or 30 hours. In my experience, the units last at least 4 years usually. Up to you.






  • As long as they get their insulin on schedule, there’s really no suffering at all. Even the injection can be done painlessly through the scruff of the neck. All you’re doing is picking up their pancreas’ slack and providing insulin when it falls short.

    There’s a little discomfort whenever you need to do a glucose curve/check, but it’s not too bad. You need a glucose monitor and test strips (not trivially inexpensive but not too expensive as a mostly one-time/rare cost). You use a lancet to prick their ear and draw a tiny drop of blood to test glucose levels and see if they’re stable. You may have to do it several times in a day to get a sense of peaks and variability, but you don’t have to do it very often once they’re stable. You get used to it and you can just give your kitty some extra treats after and you’ll be forgiven. My girl loves butter more than life itself, so I’ll often just rub my finger on a stick of butter and let her lick it off as a low-carb treat.


  • What we use is a 10 mL vial of Mylan Insulin Glargine, and her dose is I think 0.03 mL twice a day. That’s about five months or so.

    The food is a lot more expensive, at $65 for an 8.5 lb. bag on Chewy. But she’s well worth it. Don’t make this calculation based on “reduced” suffering - your cat can be perfectly fine and happy. There may be some cheaper food options and such to limit the financial impact, but there’s no reason at all that you should give up on your kitty.


  • I cried when I found out my sweet little furball was diabetic. Now about four years later, she’s 15 years old, still happy and sweet as ever. In fact, she’s snoozing happily against my leg right now. I give her two injections a day, I’ve been able to find cat sitters who can (or can learn) how to give injections, and in general she’s doing great.

    You’ll be fine and your kitty is more than capable of having a long and happy life beyond the diagnosis.

    A bottle of insulin is about $130 but lasts ages, and I’ve had her on Hill’s Science Diet m/d glucose management food for years even before she was diabetic. My other cat had kidney issues and the easiest thing was to feed them both the m/d, particularly because the vet said it’s basically one of the best things a cat could be eating anyway since they’re obligate carnivores.