Blaugust 12: FIP

We are dealing with our cat's Baby Bear's health issues right now. We have not gone to the vet yet, because they are not open until Monday. But we're certain it's FIP, because that's what 5 out of 6 of his siblings died of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feline_infectious_peritonitis

I wrote this post on the car ride home after picking up medicine. But then my phone deleted everything by closing all my tabs. So here I am writing it again. All we can do right now is wait for the medicine to hopefully take effect. And maybe if your cat is having strange symptoms that the vet says is incurable, this post can help you.

This post will discuss animal health and death.

Gizmo was a baby tortie that found us one morning when we were outside talking to our neighbor. She crawled out from under a lawnmower and meowed at us. She followed us indoors after we gave her a can of food. And she has stayed with us ever since.

She gave birth to 7 kittens: Baby Bear, Fuzzy Bear, Selina, Velvet, Butters, Mango, and a small kitten that died soon after birth. 5 out of 7 of those kittens died of FIP. She is fixed now, and very fat.

Ghost joined us not long after Gizmo found us. There was a hurricane, and another neighbor found him struggling in a storm drain. The neighbor gave him to us because apparently we're the only ones who take care of cats around here. I remember he came to us wrapped in a red blanket. We had just gotten a cloud shaped cat tree, and we let him sit on that while he acclimated to the other kittens. Ghost was young enough that he was also feeding on Gizmo's milk, though he was a bit bigger than everyone else. Gizmo accepted him as one of her own babies. Ghost died of FIP in 2024.

https://scumsuck.com/petpage/

You can see drawings I did of the kitten batch on this pet page. I haven't had the heart to update anything on that petpage since so many of them died at once.

I have a lot of pictures and videos of these cats. I wanted them to be raised properly, all fixed and vaccinated as soon as possible, never going outside. We turned our kitchen into a daycare for them, sectioning off an entire half with grid cubes to make a playpen for them, and the eventually got big enough to just crawl up the grid cubes and escape. One of the last videos I had was all of them sitting in a perfect line following a dangly fishing rod toy with their eyes. And a photo of Velvet having jumped into a bucket of paint while we were painting the kitchen. I noticed that I stop archiving photos from my phone onto my computer after 2023.

The first cat to display symptoms was Butters. We had just gotten the whole bunch of kittens fixed, and Butters was supposed to be next to get neutered. He was lethargic, and had trouble breathing. He threw up a couple of times. We thought it would pass after a couple of days, maybe he ate something weird. I remember Shane's mom telling our boy weenie Jack to leave him alone because he was sick. Butters died after a couple of days. We cancelled his neutering surgery.

He was sleeping on a blue dog bed, one that our neighbor (the same one who was there when Gizmo found us) had given to us. This neighbor had gotten sick at the same time, and left their dog Bentley. Another neighbor who was living with Bentley refused to take him to the vet, because the dog was not his responsibility. We tried to take care of Bentley as much as we could, and give him food and water and walks and a place to sleep. Bentley passed after a week of not eating.

Velvet and Mango and Fuzzy Bear were displaying the same symptoms, but this time they were very cold, and we rushed them to the emergency vet. We paid $1000 upfront to get Fuzzy Bear checked out while Velvet stayed in the car. The vet said he had parvo, which is incurable, and the could try to keep him alive for the night. We cried in the vet's room for an hour because we did not have money to pay for his intake. The vet came back and handed us adoption papers. We were to sign him away to the care of the vet, so she could take care of him the best she could. We never saw Fuzzy Bear again.

At home, we tried to keep Mango and Velvet warm in a box with blankets in it. They passed away the next day. The kittens we had left were Ghost, Baby Bear and Selina. they were getting sluggish like their siblings.

We went to a regular vet the next day. They did not diagnose them with anything in particular, but I do remember them saying that “cats don't get parvo”. So that's one of the first times I was like “hmm vets don't even agree with each other”. Just like human doctors lol. The vet sent us home with fever shots, antibiotics, and intracutaneous fluids to administer to them every 4 hours.

Some notes from a thread I was writing in my now-closed discord server:

Cerenia - anti-nausea for 24 hrs
Medicam for fever, give with wet food optimally - 5 lb dose once a day. Give more fluid if they still have fever 
Ennerfluoxon for baby bear and selina pneumonia

After a week of care, they bounced back and we thought that would be it. They would be our three surviving kittens, Neapolitan in color as white, orange, and black. It was just a stroke of bad luck that they all got parvo right after we did everything right by getting them spayed and neutered and vaccinated. Maybe they picked it up from the spay/neuter clinic. Maybe Bentley brought something in with him. Who knows.

I'll end it here for now. I injured my arm/wrist the other day while setting up the canopy that eventually broke. It hurts to use my arm, let alone type. I'll finish this up tomorrow.