Oliver James will be 13 years old on May 8. I adopted him when he was a year old. He is truly one of the most loyal and devoted animals that I have ever known.
It all started where we noticed that his stomach was bulged out. It looked as if he ate too much. Since he does eat a lot, we didn’t think too much of it at first until we noticed that it was a couple of days and his stomach was still not going down in size.
We started to worry, and my husband took him to the vet while I was at work. The vet took out a little bit of the fluid from his belly area to look at it. It was stringy, yellow, and viscous. The vet who is not one that we usually worked with, gave us LASIKs pills and said that it would reduce the fluid and make him comfortable. The vet also stated that he might have wet FIP. The vet did not explain what it was, did not explain if it was serious, but yet was saying certain words that meant this cat was “knocking on deaths door.”  
My husband left the vet office very confused. He looked up information about FIP and we found absolutely horrific info about what the illness is, how fast it attacks the cat’s health, and how quickly they could die. My husband and I were in tears, completely stressed out, trying to figure out how we are going to explain this to the children, scrubbing things down with bleach to try to save the other animals. All things that I would never want to see other pet parents go through.
We have 3 other rescue cats as well. We were absolutely heartbroken, and so upset not only because of being faced with the possibility of having our last days with Oliver James, but also for fear that another one of our animals would be infected, and that we would possibly lose them too.
Since a lot of my online following follows our adventures with our pets, I posted about Oliver James’ situation. One of my friends messaged me and explained to me that there was treatment available, but that we were going to have to go through underground type means in order to get it. This was very confusing to me because I can’t understand why a promising medication that can heal an animal would be made inaccessible. The next few hours after was very eye-opening for us.  
We learned of the group FIP Warriors who banded together in a group to help Oliver and get him medication immediately. We found his regular vet and he will be seeing her for bloodwork and other scans in addition to this treatment. After all that we have found out last night and what we went through to try and save this cat’s life, my husband and I decided that it is very important to create awareness about this. I find it extremely appalling that medication and preventative medicine to help these animals is being made inaccessible basically for the almighty dollar.  I find it appalling that I was seeing a large amount of posts from just one day alone where people were BEGGING for help because their vet could not get involved. Furthermore, I find it egregious that there is basically no awareness in open public about this illness and that people have to basically go through black market means in order to get care. I have never seen anything like this in my life. There must be a better way.

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