some backstory may be necessary
FIP is a cruel joke of a cat disease. it's a mutation of the feline coronavirus, which as you might imagine is fairly common, so virtually any cat might develop it at any time. it tends to afflict very young or very old cats. if left untreated, it is virtually always fatal in a matter of weeks. and there is no cure.
at least, there was no cure when my first cat, styx, died of FIP.
that was a long time ago now and it was very sad. it's still very sad, just, less frequently. sometimes i try to give his death meaning by reassuring myself that it led me to meet anise, but that's trading one companion for another which is kind of weird? i think nowadays i find it more comforting to think about how the universe is chaotic and things just happen and there doesn't need to be any moralish weight on them.
anyway
anise is my second cat and he has always been a sturdy guy. he's never had any real health problems. he's just, very himself. i guess every cat is, but anise is very anise. i don't know what i'm trying to say here??
(i do remember like five or six years ago, i took him to the vet for something and the vet told me he either had a UTI or some chronic condition. and it was probably the chronic condition. because anise was 5 now. which is middle-aged. he's middle-aged now. he's not so young any more. this vet just kept fucking harping on that it was so goddamn weird. anyway turned out he had a UTI and after like a week of antibiotics he was fine)
anyway like a year or two ago, maybe beginning of 2023 or so, i noticed he was losing weight.
this freaked me out a bit because styx's first symptom was weight loss. i'd gone out of town for a weekend and come back and immediately noticed his back was looking kinda bony. and now anise was looking kinda bony. and then he got kinda lethargic. he basically spent all day, every day, just sleeping. like he would get out of his cat bed, drink some water, maybe eat 1 kibble, and then go back to his cat bed. and that was it.
so we went to the vet and they poked and prodded him and said he was basically fine.
but he kept slowly shrinking and didn't seem to enjoy eating. so i thought about it and wondered if maybe he had a dental problem, that chewing on kibble was painful. so i took him back and asked them to look at his teeth real good, and lo and behold, he had a couple bad teeth. so then we farted around for like a month before he could get those teeth pulled, and then had like a month of meds afterwards, and in the meantime i'm doing stuff like putting kibble in a coffee grinder and turning it into a paste so he can just lick it up because he does seem to eat more when i do that
and i wait for the post-op soreness to probably go away, which is mostly just waiting for a length of time that seems reasonable because cats aren't real big on telling you where it hurts, and meanwhile he's having diarrhea now that seems to be unpleasant for him. so we go back to the vet, and they say hm well we still don't see any real problems but you could try this bland sensitive stomach food, maybe mix in some pumpkin. and i say ok sure and i buy a bunch of ZD and i mix in a truly staggering amount of pumpkin pureé, like the advice is to give a cat up to a teaspoon a day and i need to give him more like four teaspoons to keep him moderately regular, but it does seem to help, and he seems to enjoy eating it more.
(we came to call it Prince Food. anise soon learned that the only source of Prince Food was me, and every four hours like clockwork he would ask for some Prince Food. he did this by sitting on my desk, facing me, putting him at very nearly my eye line, and just staring at me. that's what the photo is: anise asking for Prince Food. i literally put my phone as close to my face as i could and took a picture. that is what my field of vision looked like, four to six times a day. for months.)
but he was still slowly losing weight. and we went back and forth to the vet, tried various things, waited a few weeks each time to see if anything changed (sphynxes especially seem to need time to adjust to a different diet), and it didn't. it was uniquely exhausting, and i didn't really like trying things because it usually meant he'd be miserable for a while until we gave up on it. but even the super duper bland food with a ton of pumpkin mixed in was just barely keeping him digesting anything, and he wasn't gaining any weight back, so it didn't seem like a permanent solution. and time continued to pass.
i think at the most extreme i found out he'd dropped from 11 pounds to 7.5 or something. just an entire third of my cat had disappeared. and the response from the vet was largely "huh! that's weird." meanwhile i was losing my fucking mind
they eventually directed me to an internist, and we got him an ultrasound, and it turned out his small intestine was... flattened? like you know how your intestines are full of cilia, little fleshy fingers, to increase surface area and absorb nutrients? his were just like, flat. so his guts were straight up not working good. so, no fucking wonder. but then we still didn't know why
anyway we went through this cycle of trying a couple meds again, and nothing changed, and i was about two seconds away from just blowing up the universe when the internist said
"maybe it's FIP"
and i said
"what"
because it couldn't be. he didn't have any of the bloodwork of a cat with FIP. he was about as far away from the usual FIP age range as you can get. he didn't have the swollen belly that most cats get with FIP. (apparently that happens when there's no immune response at all.) and most conspicuously, he was still alive, after like nine months of fucking around or something ridiculous.
but there is no conclusive test
so she tested his poop for coronavirus antibodies and they were through the fucking roof
so she said, ok, let's assume it is
and i said, i know exactly what to do
because you see, in the decade since styx died, someone has in fact found a cure for FIP. a cure that is effective as often as FIP itself is fatal, some ridiculous percentage like 97% of the time. it is just unbelievably good. the turnaround from "almost always die" to "almost always live" gives me fucking whiplash. truly a shining moment of human ingenuity.
there are some problems.
one of the problems is that the company that invented it has refused to submit it for FDA approval. i don't really know why. i vaguely remember a suggestion that they wanted to market it as a treatment for human coronaviruses and thought submitting it for veterinary use would interfere with that? i don't know. that sounds absurd to me. i definitely gave my cat several drugs we also give to humans in the course of this adventure, so who the hell cares?
anyway it doesn't even have a real name. it's just GS-441524. and if you want some, you have to get some knockoff stuff from a dubious seller in china.
the other problem is that you can't really give it orally, because at this point the cat is struggling to absorb nutrients. so you have to give it subdermally.
like, with a syringe.
to a cat.
who has no idea what you're doing.
also it's suspended in an acidic solution so it stings.
and your vet can't help you. because that's illegal.
she did however prescribe us a big pile of gabapentin, a fairly safe anticonvulsant with the convenient side effect of significant drowsiness.
so once a day for over a month, ash would give anise a capsule of gabapentin, transforming him into Stumble Anise. then i would load a syringe, we would hold him together, and ash would inject him, and he would be real mad, and i would give him a little cat stew treat thing, and he would go in his toasty box.
(anise started to get pretty cold, since we live in colorado, it was winter, he doesn't have fur, and he'd lost most of his body fat. there's a furnace vent near my desk, so i got one of those costco display boxes and set it up with a blanket inside and overlapping the vent a bit, so the warm air would flow into it and keep it warmed up. anise spent a lot of time in there that winter and would go there to sulk after we inexplicably bit him every day.)
and then a miracle occurred and he started gaining weight
after a month or so it's apparently safe to switch from injections to tablets, so we did that, and he kept regaining weight. and he stopped having diarrhea.
and then he stopped asking for Prince Food. he would just go eat kibble and it would be fine. there might even still be a forgotten half-can of pumpkin in the fridge that i never ended up needing.
and now he's just fine. he's not bony any more. he's active and engaging and incredibly annoying again. he doesn't have such immense stomach pain that he wakes up growling.
but now i'm not, because he's fine
he caught the same deadly disease that killed my first cat, and he fought it so hard no one even suspected he had it, and then with just a bit of black market medicine he shrugged it off like it was nothing
i think that's pretty cool of him
this was all so stressful like you would not even believe, and it spanned like all of last year. it was often hard to work. or sleep. even at best, feeding him Prince Food every four hours was an adhd nightmare, because i could only feed him on my desk and he would basically take twenty minutes to eat and i could not really do anything with him in the way.
but my relationship with the internet was kind of awkward last year for other reasons and i just did not want to bring this here while i was still in the middle of it
also thank u ash for doing some of the hard parts. i really struggle with doing a thing to a cat that they clearly do not want me to do, and i could not even get him to swallow a capsule, nevermind stick a needle in him. i don't know how i would have done this without you. you saved his life. thank you
you're welcome i'd gladly help him again
