The Mysterious Case Of The Fake Diabetes

My cat Charlie is basically a big fat faker. He's like a feline Ferris Bueller. Remember three weeks ago---three weeks ago; this is key---when he was diagnosed with diabetes, and there was much tearing of hair and rending of garments and wailing throughout all the land? And we had to drop a hundred bucks on a vial of insulin that was supposed to last him six months, and learn to give him injections twice a day, and form some sort of working relationship with all of San Francisco's catsitters in the event that we might need them to look after him whenever we went out of town? 

Well, Charlie has fooled us all, folks. He is a modern miracle of science. HE HAS CHEATED MEDICINE. He is, apparently, no longer diabetic. 

Internet, I'm not even kidding. My cat was diabetic---or "diabetic," perhaps I should say---for a grand total of three weeks. He had diabetes for the amount of time some people have a common cold. We dropped him off at the vet for an all-day glucose monitoring on Tuesday morning---oh, just ask me how much that cost---and by Tueday afternoon I had the vet on the other end of the phone.

"Hi," she said. "Good news. Charlie doesn't appear to be diabetic anymore."

"What?" I said. "He just stopped? He just stopped being diabetic? Can that even happen?"

(I talk in italics a lot when I'm incredulous about something.)

"Yup, he pretty much just stopped," she said. "He responded really well to the insulin and his pancreas just started producing it on its own again. In fact, you need to stop giving him those injections immediately. He doesn't need that insulin anymore."

"But....we just learned how to give them to him!" I sputtered. "We're totally not even freaked out by it anymore. We're all 'come here, Charlie, let me stick a needle in you. Well, that was fun; now I'm going to go back to watching Lost. Ooh, look, Sawyer!""

"That's great," said the vet. "But you can stop giving them to him now. He doesn't appear to be diabetic anymore. You caught it early enough, he responded really well, and his body just corrected itself. This is really great news."

And it is really great news, it's just also really bizarre news. I mean, I trust my vet, and I trust that Charlie actually was diabetic when she said he was diabetic---giving him the insulin injections seemed to make him feel so much better; his whole demeanor changed when we started, which just reinforced how sick he'd been before---but the whole thing just still seems so weird. Can he really have had diabetes for three weeks before being mysteriously cured? Is he some kind of miracle cat? Did one of you call in a favor to Jesus or something?

In other news, I now have a box of 75 syringes sitting in my kitchen cupboard and absolutely no use for them whatsoever. Well, that's not true; my long-awaited experiment---tentatively titled "Can I Inject Coffee Directly Into My Veins Without Having To Mess Around And Pour It Into A Mug With Cream And Sugar?"---is now well underway, thanks for asking. Except so far, all results point to no.