How not to give a cat an injection

[cjsmith]

1. Do not forget to pick up a sharps container. I do not care if your crock pot is both sterilizable and sturdy.

2. When you pull the cap off the needle, do not twitch and stab your own finger so hard that the needle gets bent.

3. When drawing insulin out of the bottle into the needle, do not flick the syringe with a fingertip like the vet-tech did to get air bubbles out of it. You are not a trained professional. A needle knocked against the inside of the bottle and angled off at thirty or forty degrees to the syringe does not help anyone.

4. Yes, you do have to find the cat. Preferably now.

5. Do not put her favorite treats down in the middle of the floor. I know this may come as a shock to you, but soon she is going to want to leave. Try putting the treats in a corner.

6. This would be a good time to chase off the snitty alpha cat who steals treats.

7. But don't scare the cat you're trying to inject.

8. If you are going to take a long time to mess about with the plunger to see you're not in a vein, make sure the cat has enough treats to keep her occupied. Or else dedicate one of your hands to keeping hold of her. A cat traipsing through the house with a needle hanging off her shoulder is only funny later.

9. Now is a bad time to faint.

10. When disposing of the needle afterwards, do not stab yourself again. Are you sure you're allowed out in public unsupervised?

Comments

[kennita.livejournal.com]

How about sublingual, or inhaled, or in a patch of some kind?

[palecur.livejournal.com]

inhaled: Pfizer (http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/02/15/pfizer_takes_a_deep_breath.php) took a good try at it, with Exubera. Patch: You're better off with small molecules. Once you start doing what it takes to drive big molecules (and insulin is, to use the technical term, both Big and Gnarly, you start running into long-term skin damage. See the above linked article's comments about potential long-term lung adverse effects with the inhaled stuff, because it's not a pure drug but rather a powder, with all the implications that 'putting really fine powder into your lungs regularly' has.

Sublingual: Don't know for sure, but my guess is similar problems to patch.

One of the problems with any of these dosing methods is accuracy and reproducibility of dose -- inhaled insulin sounds pretty awesome, but when someone has a bad case of the flu or other impairment of pulmonary function, what does that do to your dosing? Insulin has a very narrow range, in comparison to regular drugs, of over/under dose.

I recommend following the links in this search (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apipeline.corante.com%20insulin&hl=en) -- Derek Lowe writes about pharma research, and he has quite a few articles on the search for alternative insulin dosing. He rocks.

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

I've heard ads recently on the radio locally looking for people who have been diagnosed as diabetic at least 2 years with no respiratory problems to sign up for a trial of inhaled insulin. I do not know the name of the company or insulin drug involved in the trial.