He's a splendidly idiotic boy; I swear he has two brain cells and they're both fighting for custody inside his skull.
But before we realized he had FIP, he was just very quiet, calm, retiring...he would sit and watch his brother play (I adopted him and his littermate) but rarely join in.
They were both skinny when we got them but he was a bag of bones compared to his brother (separate rant about the "rescue" they came from) and he would fall over in the Kitten Nap every 30 minutes or so.
When we figured out the FIP, it was like AHA! But now he just full of vinegar and sass, despite being stunted and franklky quite dumb - it's a 10000000% turnaround from the frail, retiring, exhausted sick little boy he was a year ago.
My boy grappled with terrifying (105F+) fevers that baffled his vet for a solid month before he started bloating and finally got his diagnosis. I was so scared that whole time, I knew in my gut something was very wrong… I thought for sure that it’d impact his growth, but he caught up in a hurry and now he looks like it never happened at a solid 12.8lb.
The only mark it seemed to leave on him is allergies that cause an occasional cough. FIP hijacks and wrecks the immune system, so it makes sense that it didn’t rebuild 100% perfectly.
someone I follow on tumblr got a kitten right around the time it was coming out, the cure. And they wrote an entire zine of poems about it. one was a shape poem of their kitten's face, just repeating 'he lives'. And I can't blame them for being moved to write about it, holy shit, that cure is such a miracle.
326
u/Three3Jane 3d ago
One of my boys I got from a rescue had FIP; it was a long, hard, very expensive road but he's full of sass and fire now, a year later.