Though many of you wouldn’t know this, this site has been pretty much entirely self financed since 2008- that means even when I competed and broke a 40 year old world record to prove I actually knew what the fuck I was talking about, I did it with no sponsors, no spotter, no coach, no friends, and absolutely no money (the Patreon, as much as I appreciate, basically just pays for research materials). I’ve continued to operate that way, and paid out of pocket for my torn bicep after competing without insurance, and unlike everyone else in the industry, I paid that shit myself after borrowing money from whoever I could to cover the cost of the surgery (to which they added a shitload of extra bills and fucked my credit to the point that I gave up on credit altogether.

Which brings me to now. As much as I fucking despise turning myself into a fucking beggar with his cup out, I’ve got to because my best friend Mao is in kidney failure with a disease he seems to have caught from strays while living it up engaging in cat shenanigans. It’s called FIP (feline infectious peritonitis) and is timely due to the fact that it is a corona virus, but where most cats can just walk that shit off, Mao ended up with bad luck and it is killing him. If you follow the Instagram (which you should, since it’s where I do the post writing at the moment), you’ll notice I’ve been uncharacteristically silent the last couple of days, and that’s due to my man’s illness.

I’m not a guy who shares personal travails or tragedies, and this isn’t about sympathy. There’s a grey-market treatment for my man, but it costs money we don’t have on top of his emergency room bills, which are already a couple of thousand more than we had on hand. The organization that will be providing the treatment is doing its own fundraiser to help cut the costs of the drug, but at present we need $10k to get him out of the hospital and on the drug that will keep him from dying within a day of taking him off of an IV (and so you know your money isn’t just going to get tossed into a walking dead cat, the survival rate when treated with this 84-day schedule for this drug is 81% (they cured 25 of 31 cats in the trial).

Grey-market treatments are definitely on brand here at Plague, and unfortunately that’s all that’s available to my man other than a fatal dose of morphine. Here’s an excerpt from a news article on the treatment:

“Pedersen and his team at UC Davis found a cure in a drug known as GS-441524, or GS for short. It blocks the virus’s ability to replicate.

“We did a field trial with 31 cats and were able to cure 25 of them,” says Pedersen.

“It’s miraculous,” says Dr. Brian Murphy, who has since taken over the UC Davis feline coronavirus program. “I mean miraculous for me and super cool because we found this drug, a needle in a haystack.”

The problem? GS-441524 is almost identical to remdesivir, the much talked about drug for COVID-19 in humans, manufactured by California-based Gilead. Early on, Gilead hoped remdesivir would prove to be successful in treating humans in Ebola.

Gilead invented and owns the patents for both GS-441524 and GS-5734 (remdesivir), and its scientists co-authored the UC Davis studies that demonstrate the drug’s effectiveness in treating FIP. So far, however, Gilead has refused to license GS-441524 for use in cats.”

In case you’re curious for your own cats, we didn’t realize Mao was truly sick until the other day, due to the fact that last year he went through a protracted funk at the exact same point in the year last year. This year he failed to snap out of it though, and in a week he went from a husky indoor-outdoor cat to a very skinny and rumpled-looking mess. Sunday he threw up a bit of blood and we rushed him to the ER, where they initially thought he had the dreaded beetus (“but he’s not even fat!”, I screamed), but it turned out to be much more dire.

I know it is a shitty time of year to ask, and trust me when I say if my suicide would have raised the money in lieu of begging, I’d have chosen that route. As that’s not an option, however, I ask that you please help out my family if you have a few extra bucks this holiday season. At least so I can stop crying all over my fucking keyboard and get back to work writing 🤣🤣.

Donate on Paypal @PlagueofStrength

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/PlagueofStrength

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND HELP WITH GETTING MY MAN HEALTHY AGAIN!!!

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