Best of luck with info and management! It’s recently gotten a lot more study into it, so fingers crossed for being less of a “wow, weird, who knows” answer!
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More cat questions.
She still has not eaten any dry food, but she has been eating enough calories in wet food that I am not worried right now. (She does eat crunchy treats, so she is ok with hard foods, I have no idea why she will not eat dry kibble.) I assume it is physically fine to only feed her wet if that is what she wants and it gets her to eat? It is obviously more expensive than dry so I really hope she will go back to a combination eventually because I also have a prescription cost now. Up until recently, she has been a very affordable cat, but that seems to be changing.
I have tried 5 kinds of dry kibble in the last 8 weeks, and she only ate 1 reliably (ate the whole bag, but now will not eat the same type just in a different flavor) so I will get another bag tonight and see if she still likes it. I tried giving her a bit less wet food yesterday to see if she got hungry enough to eat dry and nope. Darn cat needs to get a job to support herself. 
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Have you tried adding water to the kibble so it softens up?
Signed, someone whose puppy has decided he’s a picky eater and he would prefer non-dry food please.
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I added broth to kibble to soften it and entice sprocket. It sometimes works.
A pet that isn’t eating is incredibly stressful.
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This is a double approach, 2 weeks of prednisone and at least 3 injections. Good times! I was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease when I was pregnant with the cuckoo so it is probably that but the steroid treatment seems to be pretty standard for any sudden hearing loss.
A1C came in at 5.5, lower than last year, so I think I am comfortable starting the prednisone first thing tomorrow morning and just being extra cognizant of my walks after lunch, maybe do some shelving in the afternoon too.
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I bought a new dry food tonight and she’s already eaten some! I didn’t even show it to her, she found it herself which is good. Fingers crossed I didn’t just jinx it. She’s already had plenty of wet food today so she may not be very hungry tonight but I’m hopeful it’s a good option.
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She ate a good amount overnight, like half of what she should have in daily calories, which I think was a lot considering she had eaten “enough” calories in wet food already. I will be very happy if she keeps that ratio and the rest is wet food. I have never limited dry food, she can have as much as she wants. I am hopeful that she has turned a corner with her new lower dose of medicine, she is acting much more like her old self now too.
Thank you everyone for the support for my catbaby.
ETA I just weighed her and she’s also gained a little weight, she’s above where she was last fall which is great. She was 8.4 in October, 7.4 from mid June until mid July and 8.8 now. Yay.
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Yay! I’m glad she’s feeling better and eating well.
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Oh, for two weeks and not having active diabetes, personally I wouldn’t worry at all! And I’m between 5.4-5.7% for my A1c depending on the draw, so sounds like the same range as you. Definitely walks help though. There’ll be side effects in that two weeks but since it’s a temporary course, it’ll probably be relatively high dose (7.5 I’m guessing?) and blood sugar will be the least of your worries then 
have you had an oral pred course? The insomnia and restlessness and irritability is REAL. On a 5mg course I washed my walls and pulled a muscle in my arm pit. 
Additional advice there: a lot of docs do a hard discontinue on pred if you’re “only” at 7.5 or 5 and “only” for a couple weeks. Ask for a taper though! A couple days of stepping it down to 2.5 before you stop can make a huge difference in how it treats you. 
one of my pet peeves is docs who don’t educate about and offer prednisone tapers. Just because a lot of pts do fine with a hard stop doesn’t mean a lot of patients dont and it’s an easy solution if you can follow a dosing plan!
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Sooooo they have me on 60 mg for the first week, then a few days of 40 and 2 days of 20. I will ask for a taper because even if I cut the pills, that would still be 10! Go figure, apparently when the consequence is “additional permanent hearing loss,” they go hard. Real hard.
They didn’t give me instructions other than “take three” so I swallowed a handful at breakfast, not sure if that was smart.
I’ve had a couple of pills here and there but it has been 25 years since I was on a full course. I don’t know what the dosage was back then of course. I do remember that I took all the pills in the morning to reduce the sleep disturbances, but I was on additional meds that could also cause sleep trouble.
(Fun fact about me: I have congenital toxoplasmosis. We didn’t have litter boxes in the 80s, my mom probably picked it up in the garden - which is actually a more riskier place than the litter box. Anyway, I have been extremely fortunate in that it manifests ONLY as floaters in my left eye and I have had only 3 acute courses, none during a pregnancy. They give you prednisone, antibiotics and antiprotozoals.)
Dr. Google suggests that Benadryl might be better than marijuana if I can’t sleep.
I can’t remember if you had GD. Being technically obese and 45 years old with a history of GD as well as a family history of Type 2, I just assume my blood sugar could go off like a bomb at any time. I’m sure that’s wildly oversimplified, but that’s how it feels.
Thank you so much for all the helpful insights!
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Yep, also GD, and since it wasn’t detected in my first pregnancy and I went on to have a 10lb baby, also treated as loud blaring sirens lucky us.
Oooof that is high doses. I suppose it makes sense given the risks at hand! I don’t know why I assumed with the injection it would be more of a maintenance dose situation. At those levels, I would definitely want to be monitoring at the a minimum my fasting levels. Technically that’s a taper, dropping by 20, but personally I’d want to go even a bit slower than that, just since it’s an easy step to avoid unpleasantness. But don’t be surprised if they’re like “but we DID a taper in the dosing”
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These red bottle onions were in my CSA box. Does anyone know how to store them, or if the green tops are edible?
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They are just a variety of onion, afaik. Treat them like green onions. You can pickle them if you want, or just cut them up.
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Yep, all the parts are edible. The tops will cook very quickly so treat them more like you would an herb (add toward the end), and the bulb and lower parts of the stems will cook like standard onion. Discard any tough or dry parts of the greens.
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Thanks for helping me with the onions! I did eat the tops like scallions and they were pretty delicious.
This week’s mystery vegetable! Any ideas?
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Squash?
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Pattypan squash.
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Eat them like zucchini or crook necked yellow squash!
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Yep - those are chubby little fellows!
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Looks like baby versions but definitely yellow pattypan squash. They also come in white, which are my absolute favorite squash ever.
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