Hello! I have a six year-old non-releasable intact male eastern grey squirrel. I've had him since he was around ~12 weeks old after well-meaning good samaritans attempted to raise him which resulted in a slight failure to thrive and extreme over-acclimation to humans. He's been in my care or the care of another wildlife rehabber since then and hasn't had any significant health or behavior issues until now.

In the past several months he showed a sudden increase in weight gain, which was unusual for him as he's always trended towards being rather thin and slight for an eastern grey. He then began showing a significant increase in drinking and urination, at which point I was able to track down a local veterinarian (who does not have extensive experience with squirrels/exotics) to look at him via word of mouth (I live in a state where squirrels are not legato keep in captivity). He was anesthetized and examined by the very kind staff and unsurprisingly his glucose (confirmed via blood and urine) was 456 mg/dL.

We opted to try cutting sugar/carbs from his diet (has was eating primarily sweet potatoes as the staple of his diet, along with many carb-heavy snacks such as dried pasta. COMPLETELY my fault and I take full responsibility/guilt for this). I switched him to kale/collard greens, Timothy hay and Henry's Healthy blocks and started doing daily urine glucose checks using dipsticks ordered online. However, after a week his glucose is still testing extremely high (>2000 mg/dL) which is dramatically higher than he tested at the vet. I'm not sure if the dipsticks are potentially inaccurate, but more likely we suspect his glucose levels are not going down. The vet and I area bit stumped what the next steps are. The vet and I searched through threads on here and saw that at least one squirrel was put on Glipizide with good success, but we aren't confident about the dosage or any other specifics about medication/management.

in summary, does anyone have any helpful information on the management of diabetic squirrels, especially using Glipizide or other medication?

Thank you so much for reading this! It means so much to me and my non-releasable squirrel (aka my beloved family member!)