Mr. Duke welcomes you to another Feline Friday. This is your weekly opportunity to soak up a bit of cat energy without accumulating hairballs around your house. Enjoy the cats and leave the hairballs to us!

In any case…It’s been nearly five years since Duke was diagnosed with feline diabetes and started getting insulin shots twice a day. When we first got the diagnosis, I thought it was sort of the end of the world as we knew it. Of course, I was afraid of giving him shots. And I thought that he probably didn’t have much time left with us.

I was wrong on both counts. And that’s lucky, since Kili is also on the insulin program. It turns out the shots are no problem. The cats don’t appear bothered by them at all. It’s just a little needle under the skin, and done. Far worse is the glucose testing, which requires drawing a little drop of blood. With cats, it’s usually done by pricking the edge of an ear. Now that is something they do notice and they really don’t like. The result is that I don’t do it as often as I should. But they’re both now quite stable, so we muddle along.

But the big lesson is that diabetes is not necessarily that big a deal for cats. Duke’s now nearly 13 years old and has been getting insulin shots for diabetes for five of those years. And he seems to be doing fine.

So, check out the rest of this week’s cat photos!