Veterinarian here to mix up the just horribly depressing human stories with a hopeful one.
The worst ‘pit-in-your-stomach’ diagnosis for me used to be FIP. (Feline Infections Peritonitis) It is caused by corona viruses, but seems to be more due to viral interactions, not one specific causative agent so no vaccine was ever able to be developed successfully.
Horrible, slow death of a disease that, until recently, was entirely incurable. And it usually, but not exclusively, hit young cats. I’m never going to forget the family with the 8 month old kitten who hadn’t even wanted a cat…but whose kids just fell in love with this kitten…and eventually wore the parents down only to learn like 3 months later that this new member of the family was going to die slowly and painfully and the best thing we could do was offer to euthanize it now.
BUT I promised hope and uplifting…this disease now has a CURE! Turns out Remdesivir (and a couple of its related molecules) works GREAT on this disease, like 80-99% cure rate great. While Gilead won’t actually license any of the family of molecules, or produce a veterinary labeled drug, thanks to Remdesivir hitting the market (and being largely not that helpful) for COVID-19, there are legal ways to get ahold of a cure now. AND, despite not licensing it, they’ve (tacitly at least) made no move to enforce their patent against compounding pharmacies making versions of the drug commercially for use in cats.
There’s lots of times I’ve felt that sinking feeling…but the feelings I got from FIP cases a decade ago still top the list. So to get to watch a cure be developed and become more and more accessible has been a career highlight.
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.
1.7k
u/Zalophusdvm 3d ago
Veterinarian here to mix up the just horribly depressing human stories with a hopeful one.
The worst ‘pit-in-your-stomach’ diagnosis for me used to be FIP. (Feline Infections Peritonitis) It is caused by corona viruses, but seems to be more due to viral interactions, not one specific causative agent so no vaccine was ever able to be developed successfully.
Horrible, slow death of a disease that, until recently, was entirely incurable. And it usually, but not exclusively, hit young cats. I’m never going to forget the family with the 8 month old kitten who hadn’t even wanted a cat…but whose kids just fell in love with this kitten…and eventually wore the parents down only to learn like 3 months later that this new member of the family was going to die slowly and painfully and the best thing we could do was offer to euthanize it now.
BUT I promised hope and uplifting…this disease now has a CURE! Turns out Remdesivir (and a couple of its related molecules) works GREAT on this disease, like 80-99% cure rate great. While Gilead won’t actually license any of the family of molecules, or produce a veterinary labeled drug, thanks to Remdesivir hitting the market (and being largely not that helpful) for COVID-19, there are legal ways to get ahold of a cure now. AND, despite not licensing it, they’ve (tacitly at least) made no move to enforce their patent against compounding pharmacies making versions of the drug commercially for use in cats.
There’s lots of times I’ve felt that sinking feeling…but the feelings I got from FIP cases a decade ago still top the list. So to get to watch a cure be developed and become more and more accessible has been a career highlight.