(a post rescued from Cohost, originally Aug 2024)

Some backstory may be necessary.

Some backstory

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, that was the state of things 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… moral weight on them.

Anyway.

The regular story

Anise is my second cat and he has always been a sturdy guy. He’s never had any real health problems.

But then a couple years ago, maybe around the end of 2022, I noticed he was losing weight. And this freaked me out a bit because Styx’s first symptom was weight loss that only I had noticed — I’d gone out of town for a weekend and returned to find his back looking kinda bony. And now I realized Anise was looking kinda bony.

And then he started getting lethargic. He’d spend basically all day, every day, just sleeping. And yeah, I know, cats sleep a lot, but they don’t just sleep. Anise would get out of his cat bed, drink some water, maybe eat a single kibble, and then return to his cat bed. That was all I saw from him all day. And he’s usually very, um… sociable? Demanding? Sociamanding.

So we went to the vet (a different one, now), and they poked and prodded him a bit, and said he was basically fine. Great news.

But he kept slowly… shrinking. And he didn’t seem to enjoy eating. I thought about this some and wondered if maybe he had a dental problem, that chewing on kibble was painful. 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 we farted around for over a month with appointments and some other vet thing I can’t remember before he could actually get those teeth pulled, and then he had 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 at least he seems to eat a bit more when I do that.

And then I wait for the post-op soreness to probably go away, which is mostly just waiting for some length of time that seems reasonable because cats aren’t real big on telling you where or how much it hurts, and meanwhile he’s now having diarrhea that seems to be especially unpleasant for him. So it’s back to the vet, and they still don’t see any clear problems, but maybe we could try this bland sensitive stomach food and mix in some pumpkin? And I go off and buy a bunch of prescription food and mix in a truly staggering amount of pumpkin purée — the advice is to give a cat up to a teaspoon a day, and I need to give him a tablespoon or more to keep him moderately regular — but it does seem to help, and he seems to enjoy eating it more. Progress! Progress?

We came to call this concotion 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. Absolutely ridiculous.

This is what I mean about Anise being sociamanding — he is very aware of the things he likes, and most of the ways he’s found to ask for them are almost cartoonishly obnoxious. Going a whole day without being physically bugged for something is rare.

…But he was still slowly losing weight. We went back and forth to the vet, trying various things, waiting weeks each time to see if anything would change — sphynxes especially seem to need time to adjust to a new diet, so it was really hard to know when to call something a definitive failure — and it wouldn’t. It was uniquely exhausting. I really didn’t like the endless treadmill of just trying endless minor variations of food and medication, because each one meant risking he’d be even more miserable for a while until we gave up on it. But even the super duper bland prescription 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 something like 7½. An entire third of my cat had disappeared. And the response from the vet felt like "Huh! That’s weird." Meanwhile I was losing my fucking mind in this slow burn that dragged on for months.

They eventually directed me to an internist — something I wish had occurred to me much, much sooner — who gave him an ultrasound. It showed his small intestine was… flattened? Like, you know how your intestines are full of cilia, all these tiny fleshy fingers, to increase surface area for absorbing nutrients? His were just like, flat. So his guts were straight up, uh, not working good. Well no fucking wonder. But we still didn’t know why.

We went through this cycle of trying a couple meds again — I remember steroids, because autoimmune was on the table — and still nothing changed. We were approaching a year of this at this point, I was constantly thinking about what a massive percentage of Anise’s lifespan that is, 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. The usual FIP age range is very young or fairly old, and he was close to smack-dab in the middle of those. 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 this extensive period of fucking around.

But there is no conclusive test, so it’s hard to definitively say yes or no. The internist tested his poop for coronavirus antibodies and they were off the charts — like, I think, literally beyond what the test can accurately count — so she said, ok, let’s just assume it is.

And I said, I know exactly what to do.

The cure

Because you see, in the decade since Styx died, someone has 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. It even works on cats who are in worse shape than Styx was when I euthanized him. Truly a shining moment of human ingenuity.

…There are some problems.

One 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 I recognized as things we also give to humans in the course of this adventure, so why would this be a problem?

It doesn’t even have a real name. It’s just GS-441524. If you want some, you have to get it off-brand from a slightly dubious seller in China. I don’t know why it’s China but all the sellers seem to be in China.

The other problem is that you can’t really give it orally, because at this point the cat’s guts can’t absorb anything. So you have to give it subdermally.

Like, with a syringe.

To a cat.

Who has no idea what you’re doing.

And just as a bonus, it has to be suspended in an acidic solution, so it really stings.

And your vet can’t help you do it.

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 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. We might even still have a can or two of bland prescription food somewhere 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.

It feels like a fucking miracle. He caught the same deadly disease that killed my first cat, and he fought it so hard no one even suspected he had it because he wasn’t sickly enough, 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.

The aftermath

This was all so stressful like you would not even believe, and the whole saga spanned over a year. It was often hard to work. Or sleep. At best, feeding him Prince Food every four hours was still an ADHD nightmare — I could only feed him on my desk lest other cats interfere, he would take some twenty minutes to eat (he’s always been a dawdling eater), and I couldn’t really do anything else with him in the way. I’m very glad it’s over, and I’m sure he is too.

All this has left me thinking about the series of cat eulogies I’ve written here and how I’m kind of tired of doing that. So I think I would like to post all about Anise while he’s, y’know, still alive. I’ll get on that.

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And thank you, Ash, for doing some of the hard parts. I really struggle with wrangling a cat who really doesn’t want to do something — I would’ve had a hard time getting him to swallow a pill, let alone holding him still enough to stick a needle in him. I do not know how I would’ve done this without you. So as far as I’m concerned, you saved his life. Thank you.