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 🤣🤣.
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THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND HELP WITH GETTING MY MAN HEALTHY AGAIN!!!
Our system of Health care for Humans and animals is screwed. Just about everyone reading this blog takes care of themselves, but random crap happens. That’s when the “system” gets to fuck with us. Be a Hooligan (see posts on this site) and help make some changes. (Start by donating!)
Thanks dude! And I have faith that we’ll get the shit sorted out. People forget that everything everyone’s done since the horse was domesticated was a quick fix to solve a problem that’s already come to a head, and then endless patches on that. We’re always playing catch up. Once we have AI helping optimize things I’d imagine the system will get overhauled just because its inefficiency would break a machine mind haha. And seriously, thanks! Mao’s not doing great, honestly, but cat kidneys are made of glass and we might have caught it too late. He lost a ton of weight at the exact same time last year, and got real weird and moody, so we thought he was just going through a weird kind of seasonal affective disorder. Plus, cats are fucking weird and occasionally they just sulk in spite of everything. Well, I guess that makes them exactly like humans. Anyway, we went through a ton of self shit talking, but I am certain we’ve done as much as people could do, so all I can do now is beg my main man to eat and hope. And walk around looking like I got maced all the time lol.
I sent what I could. As I know it really sucks when the kitties have major health issues (I previously had one with diabetes that went ketoacidosis a few times, not fun at all). Though, how many cats do you have/enjoy the company of (as I haven’t seen any word or photos of is in for a while).
I have four cats- I post about them primarily on my Instagram (as I’ve been posting most shit recently). Mao’s been with us two years- he was dropped at our house while we were at work by a firend of a friend and has been living with us since. We’d thought he was four or five, but as it turns out he’s closer to ten (but besides this FIV thing he’s healthy as a fucking horse). Prior to him we had two other cats, though one was deaf in one ear and ended up getting clipped by a car on his deaf side and died right after Mao came to live with us. A month later we adopted two feral kittens from our neighborhood (they were from the same litter and the rest of the litter died), bringing us to four!
And thanks so much for the help! If you want updates on my man, I’ve been keeping everyone up to date on my instagram. It’s @plagueofstrength. Thanks again!!!!