Ask me about Sprinkle

so, at the end of October, Beatrice was brought to the emergency vet because she was impacted (this is a common issue with Manx cats, due to their nerves being a little fucked up near the base of their tail) -- the emergency vet helps her and also checks her lungs, and we discover that Beatrice has asthma.

The emergency vet gives us about a week's worth of steroids to treat her asthma until we can get to the actual vet, and they tell us that an inhaler is also an option -- it is less harsh on kitty's systems, but a lot of cats don't like having stuff on their face. However, we were told that Beatrice seems like she would be tolerant of it, and we agreed that she would probably prefer an inhaler to having a pill hidden in her food or shoved into her mouth.

Within a few days, we do visit the vet, where the doctor we saw was very dismissive of my partner's questions about an inhaler. We were told it was "too expensive" and that "not a lot of cats like it", not given a price, and Beatrice was prescribed more steroids.

In the months since then, Beatrice has gotten progressively thinner -- she lost 15% of her body weight within two months, and we were told that any cat losing even 5% of weight in that time is extremely worrisome. She was uninterested in food, wasn't as lively as usual, her coat got very greasy, and she just generally seemed very sick. She is currently still only three pounds.

We brought her back to the vet yesterday -- where we saw a different doctor -- where she received some IV fluids and they ran a blood panel. We got a call back a few hours later telling is that Beatrice has feline Diabetes, and will need to receive insulin injections twice a day/every 12 hours.

The kicker? The steroids she's on -- the ones my partner didn't want and would have preferred an inhaler over them -- are renowned for taking Pre-Diabetic cats and pushing them into Diabetes.

Another kicker? As I said, Beatrice is a Manx. After receiving the call, we looked it up; Diabetes is the most common disease amongst the Manx breed.

The vet that we saw did not warn us of the possibility of aggravating Beatrice's diabetes.

Currently, we are faced with the following:

The best case scenario is that Beatrice receives her insulin injections along with her inhaler after our next visit, and her diabetes goes into remission. Following this, she would use an inhaler, which was what we wanted for her in the first place, thousands of dollars poorer for the same result and extreme stress on Beatrice (and our) system.

The worst case scenario is that Beatrice has this condition for the rest of her life, and receives insulin injections twice a day, as well as two $700 blood tests a year.

So, tl;dr: