Tomten's Birthday

"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." ~ Einstein on the death of his friend Besso

Just wanted to drop a note to say that Tomten & Gizmo celebrated their 6th birthday last week! Yeah! Happy Birthday Tomten & Gizmo! For those of you who are newly diagnosed and feeling at a total loss. I wanted to share that bit of news. Tomten was diagnosed July 1st 2012 with dry FIP. He has been on the feline interferon and pred ever since. While he has his good days (totally normal mischievous Devon Rex) and his slow days (sleeps all day and scares us to death) his quality of life seems good. We never thought we would see this birthday so we celebrated with a nice long walk outside on his leash, a can of tuna fish, and plenty of cat nip! I don't know how long he has but we treasure each day! Thanks to everyone who helped him see this birthday! ~ Cassie (details of treatment here )

Many happy returns to Tomten and his littermate Gizmo (who doesn't have FIP)! Cassie is so thoughtfully posting his updates to keep our spirits up  as we watch the steady stream of kittens dying from FIP on the FIP fighters facebook community.
This month Mihoshi Barner - the little Ferret with FIP who has been on PI for over a year, passed away leaving a very sad owner behind. Ferrets do not live as long as cats so in ferret years I wonder how old he was? Mishka was 27 in accelerated cat time when she died, which is some sort of cold comfort. Tomten and Gizmo are the equivalent of 41 human years old wow, nearly middle aged by the catyears calculator ( in the right column menu overthere ) - no wonder he's catnapping all day. Hiphip hooray! Kill Da virus!

Gizmo on left Tomten on right

Leap of Faith

"Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it." - Tori Amos

I wrote this just before Mishka died on Feb 1st but I've decided to post it unchanged. Update: a few edits and see the comment from Dusty's mum below!
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Dusty is the reason we are treating Mishka. Dusty survived wet FIP of the lungs in part thanks to injections of feline interferon and oral prednisone in 2007. I first wrote about him in a post about Hope http://onecatlife.blogspot.com/2012/10/hope-is-black-swan.html

Virbac sent me the case history and amazingly here was a cat I could believe in because I knew the vet practice in Sydney (I think my mum even took our old cat there on occasion. Chloe was a stray my brother took in who lived to be 17 on a commercial diet without ever getting regular vaccinations btw)  so I phoned the vet, Simon Craig who verified the cat was still kicking and had made it off the interferon. Based on Dusty's outcome we did the math and decided we could afford the treatment on the basis of expecting a dead cat or a cure in a little over two weeks - but there you have it, each case is unique and Mishka has not progressed as well - but she's not dead either, so the budget is completely blown by five months worth of extra drugs. We have apparently converted an acute illness into a chronic one - as allopathic medicine does so well.

Possibly due to her more advanced disease ( she has abdominal FIP as well) her own genetic challenges (she is a Birman, Dusty is a Scottish Fold) or that two week delay or not using the steroids first up. Dr Addie does mention in her wet fip case study, which I only recently read, that the wet FIP response to FOI is higher for cats with FIP of the lungs, and doesn't seem to work as well on abdominal FIP.

My suspicion is this is because abdominal FIP can be cryptic for longer in that area without causing distress. Mishka had abdominal fluid for a few weeks to a month perhaps before we knew she was sick.

It wasn't until her lungs really filled up that we rushed to the vet. Perhaps she was also dehydrated somewhat and thirstier than usual. Here she is the night before, mucking about and looking ok:

She may have been sick for much longer as the earliest signs are so hard to detect as abnormal, if indeed they were - she started being more sleepy (thought that was natural as a cat growing older and not being a kitten any longer), more cuddly and purry - well she got to know us and that's a nice thing, she was very hungry and insisted on 4 am snacks - well she's a growing cat. She got so chubby she was stuck in her cat door - that was cute (ok my son had at that stage twigged something was up. "mum Mishka is not a cat anymore" ? "Definition of a cat - fits anywhere the head fits" ??!!! )

Definition of a cat - fits anywhere the head fits

 Mishka's Leap of Faith

 
and so we followed the example of Dusty. I feel like a cartoon character that's headed over the cliff - can't stop running to look down now or gravity will reassert itself. Hoping to make it to the other side on pure momentum. Courage kitty - leap!

Die another day - Toby and 0029

"I'm checking out. Thanks for the Kiss of Life." ~ James Bond (Die Another Day)

oh heck - just as the rest of her seems to be rallying kitty has a 'funny lump' under the skin which is possibly getting bigger. The vet is ignoring it strenuously and I'm not thinking straight - perhaps I should have jumped on it last week and investigated while she was under for the drain. The thing neither of us want to face is the prospect of a malignancy.

Seems she is simply dying more slowly, as our vet puts it - or living to die from something else like Toby - who was an uneutered Tom cat from Woodstock Ontario Canada. Toby lived the bachelor lifestyle, out partying every night and returning home in the daylight hours for food. When he got wet FIP he survived due to the ministrations of his owner, homeopathy and a change of diet (he stopped Taste of the Wild dry food and the pokeweed prescribed by a naturopath amongst other things); Toby fast tracked from having a FIP belly drained in August 2011 to normal function, including the partying, by September a few weeks later. He had places to be and cats to see - ladies to romance, guys to fight I guess and in April 2012 walked off into the night, sporting a swollen leg from an encounter of the 007 kind, never to be seen since by his human, Monika.

There was similar kitty, known only to me as "29" who was one of the original cats on the Polyprenyl Immunostimulant study. 0029 had dry FIP with neurological symptoms, who during treatment got well enough to get back to the killing business but met his match in a coyote. "when he was sick he was hanging around the house, once he started feeling better, it was hunting again, it was bringing little presents to the owners on a regular basis." ~  Dr Legendre WINN Feline Symposium transcript

But of course I am the eternal optomist. Unlikely things happen such as Miko the red burmese being reunited at the grand old age of 17 with his family in Essex, UK after a staggering ten years AWOL thanks to his microchip. Who knows, Toby is merely MIA he may reappear into Monika's life somewhere down the road.

from humortrain

Mishka by Moonlight

"Do you believe in immortality? No, and one life is enough for me." - Albert Einstein

Mishka was two in September but in cat years she is 25 - what should be her prime. We took her home to LIVE, and not spend too much of that doing stuff she doesn't like. So emphasis noms, sleeping in the sun, trying to catch a bird.
or a frog - since the nights are warm Mishka was allowed her hearts desire to head out after her midnight snack and I found a little frog for her to play with. The little brown frogs who live in the water tray of my potplants hop about on the window cleaning up moths after dark. They are not fussed about being picked up - we took one to school for show and tell once. No danger of our fat furball catching it - always one bemused hop behind the frog.
Sometimes she doesn't want to hunt - she just listens to the wind and sniffs. The scent of the night garden is different and Mishka by moonlight is exquisite - it's her element. Such a shame i can't capture a picture of her luminous fur, shadow like a second cat spirit beside her under a strange dark bright sky, the fullmoon on the sea beyond and the southern stars above ... plainly I'm no poet; you had to be there. Just sitting.

So tick one off the bucket list. Cats are crepuscular (FIP expanding my vocab again) most active around dawn and dusk. Really I can't understand people who want a cat to give up being a cat to be on people time.
Now that Mishka has celebrated christmas with us our next goal is easter. I saw this while grocery shopping today - fresh baked just after boxing day and best before New Years day! Perhaps we should make the goal Valentines Day.

Christmas Wish for Mishka

"Has The Cat been a good The Cat? That is the question...." ~ Tummymountain 

Oh I so think she has! Do visit the Tummymountain link - i didn't want to steal their picture of cat's wishes - it is heartmeltingly cute and accurate.

Cats live in the moment so Mishka's not counting sleeps to Christmas and neither is she stressed out waiting for the latest wonder drug that might help her win out over FIP ... but I am! We are waiting on PI - the Polyprenyl  immunostimulant (which we were told doesn't work for wet FIP) we now know has apparently cured one cat named Miracle, and an enzyme preparation called Serapeptase. Pray customs have some xmas spirit though they are not noted for it :(

and we have reached the end of the financial tether - actually i think we passed that redflag months ago but apparently cats are colour blind. If you were thinking of sending me a christmas card save a tree, if you were going to take me out for a cup or coffee and cake, save my aching joints by hitting the donate button below instead - paypal doesn't take much off it and they are secure.

Just by donating $5 you can help Mishka pave the path for other FIP cats with experimental treatment. Dr Norris Associate Professor in Veterinary Microbiology SYdney University says PI is definitely worth a try in Mishka - 3 months survival is a very good result so far. Mishka has the rarest and most advanced sort of fip affecting both lungs and abdomen. PI is only available in america and its use for FIP is considered 'off label'. We can raise a few extra hundred to also set up a stockpile of PI for rapid response for australian cats. The drug's price is quadrupled by taxes and customs forms which have to be purchased each time the PI is ordered so if can spread this out it over one big order this helps and importantly avoids delays in treatment which are fatal for FIP cats. If you are going to treat FIP do it early. Viruses multiply by doubling - do the scary math. Dr Norris is importing two boxes with her own money.

Once protocols for treatment are established through trial and error the survival rate goes up - it's not just all about double blind research studies. Sick cats like Mishka also just have to do the hard yards of the learning curve in the early days.

A Deliberate Cat Life

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau

Are you dying every day or living every day? 

Is our little cat dying more than living? That is the question we ask every day with FIP. Today Mishka was living - waiting by the door after breakfast to head off into the sunshine, enough pounce to try for a lizard that scuffled past her favourite resting place under the ash tree. So it was a good day.

When you find out your cat has got FIP you ask what could you have done to prevent it? You have seen at least one thing, probably many things, on the list of stressful events you did which depress the immune system causing the virus to mutate inside your cat, and will waste some time beating yourself up over it. Rehoming is one of them.

"Mummy, mummy can I have a cat?"

 Mishka came to us when my son's violin teacher moved to England and left her kitty behind, a fluffy indoor cat with dreams of being a snow leopard. Being housebound was never her thing so we decided to take her and give her the freedom of a big sunny garden in which to be a cat. We were aware and prepared if she fell prey to snakebite or a hungry eagle - but a virus she caught indoors from her mum was an irony never on our radar.

So if there is a wish fairy for terminally ill cats Mishka would like the 'catching a bird' experience please in this cat life.

What's on your bucket list?