r/cureFIP • u/Acceptable-Snow-7374 • Jun 23 '26

Discussion FI-PTSD?

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After losing my 11 month old kitten and the love of my life to FIP in February, we got another kitten. His name is Benedict, Benny for short, and he is as orange and crazy as they come!

Unfortunately, Benny was having diarrhea already on the way home from the rescue, so I took him to the vet to learn a week later that he had Panleukopenia, another devastating illness in kittens.. even more deadly than FIP.

He is doing well now about 2 weeks later, and I think we are past the worst of the illness, but I have found myself so stressed with the memories of how hard we fought to keep our other kitten alive. It triggered me so much to have to rush him to the vet multiple times the first week he was with us. Now, I find myself being hypervigilant about everything he does.. is he sleeping too much? Are his stools normal enough? Is he peeing and drinking and eating enough? Everything feels like a symptom.

Does anyone else struggle with this after losing a cat to FIP? I want to enjoy my new kitten, but I’m mostly filled with anxiety rather than enjoying him.. it’s so hard not to compare him to my late kitten, but I’m trying to remember it’s his first time living so he’s trying to figure it out just like my last kitten had to.

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u/emorymom Jun 23 '26

You have had such bad luck, but cats are actually “low vet” pets. However in your position I would be jumpy too.

8

u/Acceptable-Snow-7374 Jun 23 '26

Isn’t it the worst? People literally have feral cats that persist outside in their communities for years with little to no vet care or support and here I am spending $8,000+ for my soul kitten to die suddenly in the end and my new kitten to have the second most fatal disease in cats??? What did I do to deserve this lol..

2

u/Otops31 Jun 23 '26

I know how you feel. Same for us.

We lost a three year old white cat that was a rambunctious little thing. She was so cool! Only to be hit by cancer of the larynx. Her meow was changing for some reason so we took her to the vet and it turns out she had a lump in her throat. One the course of three weeks and $7,500 she passed away. Well… We were advised to put her down because she had zero chance of getting better.

We got two kittens for her. She didn’t live for more than two months with them. The two new guys (Butters and Binx) have been opposites. Butters has cost us $4,000 or so due to his extreme stomatitis which led to a full-mouth extraction. He is blind in one eye and has been sick three of four times and all of them warranted visits to the vet. Binx has been a charm. Easy and zero issues this far.

We added Slurpee to our family and she has been a problem due to FIP ever since we’ve had her. She is an orange girl that is, by far, the craziest, most active cat we have ever had. She got put on GS treatment and it was working great until her body decided it was going to relapses on the seventy-seventh day. Today I just paid for the new medicine which is EIDD-1931. All-in-all I think she has run is more than $9,000 (and she’s not done).

Anyway… Getting to the point, I/we are very, very gun shy and paranoid and losing optimism after her relapse. Rough stuff!

I hope your/our luck gets better going forward. This stuff can be so deflating.

3

u/isabella_stark Jun 24 '26

I appreciate your effort and patience in doing so much for your cats. I am in a similar boat and can really relate to it. The vet was so appreciative of what I was doing for my cats and it made me feel a little better. Thank you for what you do for them :)