#fip

Because ours wasn't.

We're the kind of people who keep contact with our cats fosters if we can, and we actually are friends with Diego's original foster family. We were there to meet one of their other fosters, Mittens, who passed away from FIP around Christmas, shortly after meeting her. Taylor looked into FIP in that moment, and he'd been very fond of her and when things like this happen, he's the type to do as much research as he can.

Then Diego got it.

We contacted the head of the organization his foster family worked through, let her know that Diego would likely be passing. We believed we needed to choose to let him go. We had an expensive test to run that wasn't reliable, that would take a week he didn't have, just to see if that was even what we had. He wasn't getting better.

"I know people." She'd said. "I know a charity. We didn't get treatment in time for Mittens, but it sounds like you have time. I'll give you their number." We actually made contact with the woman who owns the first cat ever cured of FIP - which is a bit like going to the heart transplant patient to do a heart transplant, but that's still someone who can connect you to people who can do the dang transplant.

The FIP -

There are several types of FIP, flat categorized as 'wet' or 'dry' - ours was dry, the Neuro variety, which means it had gotten to his brain, impairing his balance and beginning to make it's way to his motor functions as well as other areas. This is more difficult to treat because it's in the brain at that point. And that involved a higher dosage of medicine in order to get the brain healthy again.

The Treatment -

What followed was several months of injections. Followed by several months of pills. Followed by several months of monitoring. The process started on February 9th of this year 2025, all the way to July 27th of 2025, his last day of his observation period, and I'll explain that later in the post.

The doctor made several prescriptions for him - prednisone and onsior for the swelling of his gums, and veraflox due to bacterias. On top of this, we worked with other medicines, outside of the veterinary system.

This is Capella, and AwayFIP in it's liquid form. We started with the Capella, as it was purer and he was critical, injecting 1.1 ml a day to start. It was important to do it around the same time every day, for consistancy's sake. We were given a diagram, too, as to the order of which to inject him, in order to avoid scarring or too much irritation.

This white patch is his fur not growing back - there is a scar left over from him fiddling with the injection site. He scratched at it.

The medicine was painful. He'd howl. It was haunting. To hurt our cuddly baby like that made us cry and made it hard, but we had to do it. He doesn't cuddle the same way anymore - but he's warming up to it again. He slept under my arm one recent morning, close to my body. He regularly goes to his daddy for cuddles. He purrs. It was something he has grown back into doing, but something he couldn't do now if we hadn't done this.

Vigilance -

For the next few months, we would become helicopter cat parents. There wasn't a physical movement he could make without us knowing about it.

We monitored his temperature every few hours - We slept in shifts to do so. Cats need a temperature of 100.5-102.5. The vet gave us subcutaneous fluids to bring home in case his temperature spiked, and we borrowed a heating pad from his foster family - because now he was dropping too low as well, typical with neuro-type FIP. I needed more sleep because I'm the one who drives to collect the medicine and I'm the one with an 8-5 job that would earn the money we needed to treat him. Poor Taylor had so many sleepless nights, and I spent many work days (I'm WFH) tending to our baby boy while he slept in the mornings.

We tracked his weight - cats are roughly a pound per month until they're a year old, in which it's evened out. He was severely underweight due to the FIP inflaming his gums and his reluctance to eat any food that wasn't soft, then any food at all. We switched him to pate's and began blending it with water in order to create a slurry for him. Sometimes we used a syringe to manually feed him ourselves. Sometimes he'd drink it on his own. Slowly, he'd work his way up to actual pate. His attention, from the neuro-type FIP, wasn't great, so we'd have to move the bowl around to re-engage his interest in it. Sometimes, he'd eat a full can. More often, he'd eat half and we'd save the other half for later.

We tracked his stool - loose stool wasn't good for him because it raised questions on what he was retaining and what he wasn't. We monitored his every bowl movement in the litter box, nights and mornings, to see if it was firming up. Only when it was solid could we switch from those painful injections to pills.

We tracked his blood - every few weeks, he needed new blood work done in order to assess what level of treatment he still needed, his dosages, and how he was progressing. The book we got broke down all of the terms up there, though you can see his blood count improved a lot over that time period and that was a huge sign of improvement.

We have logs in our WhatsApp with each other, going back and forth with temperatures, amount ate, behavior checks, the works. There was nothing going on that we didn't know about. Nothing.

The Thing We Didn't Know About -

The vet, for his symptoms, put him on Veraflox, an antibiotic, which makes sense considering he was kept overnight at the vets office (bacteria abound) and eliminating bacteria was a general good considering his sickness. However, visibly, there is a negative interaction between his medicine and Veraflox. There were a few days where suddenly, his treatment was thrown into disarray just making sure he was okay from the mix-up.

There was stress - how could the people who gave us the dang book have missed that when we mentioned it? Obviously the Veraflox was out, and it was time to go to our normal vet and explain what we were doing. We bought him a whole separate book on the process and he agreed to continue to give Diego care, alongside our home remedy approach. And, further lucky, he didn't think we needed a replacement for the Veraflox.

We caught it in time, it was only for a few days, But it did set us up for even more anxiety and need to monitor his behavior to make sure nothing went wrong as a result. And tension was already high - his life was on the line, after all.

The Pills -

It was such a goddamn relief when we were able to switch to the pills. Let no one ever tell you those injections are easy, injecting your own cat with anything is hard. The skin is thin and could easily pierce through the other side, so you need to be really careful and the cat needs to be very still. Taylor pricked himself once with the needle tip and he himself talked about how much it stung and hurt.

The pills were a godsend. We even got the above tool to help us distribute it. Load the half-of-a-pill into the tube, slide it down his tongue and shove it right in his throat, reward with a treat. We even still have some. Well beyond useless now, but we'd held onto them just in case they came back during the soon-to-be-mentioned grace period.

We were still monitoring his weight and temperature, but he was coming in at a good high 99 to mid-100's at this point. We were in the clear.

Grace Period -

In late April, his direct treatment ended, but there was a grace period we needed to keep an eye out for. The first three months post-direct treatment of FIP are where they see a majority of relapses, though it could happen for up to a year after treatment. But! Those first three months? Very important, that's the hot zone.

We eased off his temperature-checking, but still took it regularly, we still monitored his eating - we found he only likes the gravy centers from fancy feast and the beef ragu with pearl pasta because I could talk at length about his bread obsession - and we didn't go out much through all of this. If we did, it was for little moments at a time, so we could be close, or I'd go out for us and bring something back We needed the money for his treatment, and we needed to be home for him, so...

So soon it was July. And his grace period had... ended. None of the anxiety did, we weren't totally out of the woods yet - any largew amount of stress could cause a relapse still, and we needed to be on top of that. But besides that it felt so... simply put. The day came, nothing changed. Just a little note about him graduating from the program and anything up to a year would be considered a relapse. He was... tentatively cured. Any stress could relapse him, so we still needed to be

Then What Happened? -

HE ATE A FUCKING HEADPHONE WIRE IS WHAT HAPPENED

LOOK AT THAT. IT IS NOT SMALL AND HE ATE THAT. HE RIPPED IT OUT OF THE HEADPHONES AND FUCKING ATE THAT WHOLE THING. HE THREW UP AFTER DOING IT AND DID NOT THROW UP THE WIRE AND I CLEANED IT UP AND WE WONDERED WHY HE STOPPED EATING AND SHITTING UNTIL A GODDAMN PART OF THE WIRE CAME OUT HIS BUTT.

Do you know how SCARED I was, young man? Do you know how close we were to making a god damn hard choice until we got CareCredit approved for a fucking thousands-of-dollars surgery?! Of course he doesn't know. OF COURSE HE DOESN'T KNOW. LOOK AT HIS FACE. HE DOESN'T KNOW.

This was in September of 2025, only a few months after his grace period ended, and we were simultaneously worried about post-surgery and a potential relapse. We didn't take his temperature for stress reasons, but we kept feeding him, locked him in our bedroom and power-cleaned the entire apartment just to make sure he didn't fuck anything else up for himself. He didn't even seem that stressed. Just hated that fucking cone so much. We spent another month of 2025 just worrying over him and making sure he was constantly monitored for a bajillion different reasons. We only just recently paid this surgery off.

Was it worth it? Of course it was. But Ooh. Oooh this boy.

How Is He Now?

Annoying but healthy.

He's gotten used to me waking up at 7 every morning to feed him pate, so he wakes me up by licking my face and eating my hair and digging under my pillow and then he steals my spot. I have to chase him down to finish his food. He constantly knocks over and spills things. We bought a breadbox because he likes to eat bread so much he ripped open two loaves of it just so he could tear into and devour it. He plays fetch. He plays every day and he loves to jump high for things. He annoys his brothers. He follows sunbeams and the light when it catches off my engagement ring. He screams from room to room until we play with him for a fourth time. He doesn't think about anything that isn't exactly what's dangling in front of him. He's naughty. He's dear to me. I love him so much.

So, uh... thanks everyone for reading. Thanks for donating if you did. And thanks for just - being here when I needed you. Especially my buddy @corvidcorgi, who everyone should follow and be friends with because bro, you truly kept me sane throughout the entire fiasco.

I swear this was gunna be way more organized when I wrote it out, but then September Happened and then the holidays and then the anniversary of his diagnoses and treatment and....

He's going to be 2 years old June 1st. We didn't even think he'd make it to a single year old at the start of all of this.

FIP doesn't need to be a death sentence. There's hope. There's good people willing to do whatever it takes and good research being done and medicine being released and assessed and good friends who can keep you stable through the hardest, hardest of things you need to do.

I'm sure you noticed I'm roughly back. But, I also started a roleplay blog for my favorite lego monki/e kid character, so if anyone wants to kick around and send some asks or watch some good toons, find me at @6em4k, it's a good time. It really got me doing something fun on occasion.

And! Speaking of! My roleplay buds were also huge boons to my mental health at this time. I really appreciate all of you for giving me some respite. I know I was majorly absent last year but it was still... it was still nice to talk to y'all when I was on. It still helped.

So.. Thanks. everyone. For everything.

Il existe des endroits où le temps lui-même parait retenir son souffle. Les cimes qui entourent la vallée de Chamonix en font partie, des paysages immaculés où culmine à près de 4000 mètres l’emblématique aiguille du Midi. Dominant la Vallée blanche au fond de laquelle meurt lentement la Mer de Glace sous l’assaut du réchauffement climatique, c’est ce décor hors du monde et où aimaient rôder les dieux qui forme l’écrin du nouveau clip somptueux dévoilé aujourd’hui par Kēpa.

Avec la sortie en 2018 de son premier album produit par Taylor Kirk,Ouverture dans un nouvel onglet Bastien Duverdier de son vrai nom donnait alors naissance à son one-man-band de blues un peu cinglé. L'ancien champion de skate diagnostiqué d’une méchante maladie y cultivait sa passion pour Bukka White et les guitares Dobro avec sa belle voix grave, un harmonica et tout un attirail sonore qu'il se plaisait à jouer seul sur scène. Trois ans plus tard, l’attachant guitariste réitérait encore avec Divine Morphine, un second disque en forme de trésor de spleen et de blues, illustré notamment par un joli clip vacillant d’absurdité.