Our shy skittish cat jumped up onto my lap—and, in doing so, knocked against the rickety side-table, so that first my dinner plate and fork crashed to the ground; and then, a brief moment later, my 850-page book—or perhaps the crashes were the other way around, it’s difficult to reconstruct. In any case, the cat transformed from cat to whirlwind, and I have a spiral of long parallel scratches tracing my lower arm from wrist to elbow. They’re almost pretty; I could imagine getting that pattern tattooed. Luckily I had clipped his nails just a few days ago, while he was gabapentin’d for a vet appointment, so the scratches are more welts than slices, with only three relatively small (though still satisfyingly dramatic) places that required band-aids.

This is the cat who just finished a second course of expensive medication for FIP. He saw the vet, who said his kidney is back to normal size (good!) and his weight is back up (good!) and his physical exam is back to normal (good!) and his bloodwork shows his anemia is resolved (good!). Unfortunately the bloodwork also shows poor kidney numbers, which could mean the FIP did permanent damage or could mean the FIP is ongoing or could mean there’s something else going on (nothing good); and the bloodwork also shows his globulins are…I think it was that they continued to be HIGH, and in any case I know it was QUITE NOT GOOD, because the vet went from celebratory (she’d HUGGED me when she measured his kidney) to subdued.

We are doing a third round of the medication, even though I’d previously said that if the second round didn’t work, I would be done. For one thing, it is only recently that “one round” (84 days) of medication became two rounds (42 days seemed sufficient for most cats), so REALLY we could say we completed ONE old-fashioned 84-day round and now are doing another half-round. For another thing, I spoke frankly to the vet and said I didn’t want to be crass but that I was wondering at what point do we stop sending good money after bad. And she was extremely understanding, and re-phrased it better than I had (I appreciated that she included a section about how we might feel one way about the money if the cat lived, and another way entirely if he did not), and said that of course OF COURSE we could stop treatment at any time and she would not consider that a Wrong Decision—but that if I wanted her opinion she felt that, based on his improvement so far, another round of the medication was reasonable and justified. She said of course OF COURSE we couldn’t know it would work, and that if it did NOT work, then we would probably want to have The Talk. But she felt there was good reason to hope. So we are doing another round of medication.

A complicating factor is that this FIP treatment is so new, they don’t have good data to draw from. She said that of the cats in their practice who had undergone the treatment, all of them had either died or else recovered completely with 1-2 rounds of treatment, so she had nothing to go on. I said, “So we are doing science RIGHT NOW,” and she said “We are doing science RIGHT NOW.”