Hyperfixed - Bonus Episode: The Legend of Captain Prince Tango

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

In the last of our Cat Drug Black Market episodes, we talked to Doina Nugent, a pet parent that went to FIP Warriors for help when her cat, Captain, was diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitis, and we get her perspective on the Cat Drug Black Market, when things don't go according to plan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey, everyone, this is Alex. If you are listening to this, that means you're a paid member, and I appreciate it, because you are the engine that keeps the show going. I mean, it is thanks to you that we were able to spend the last six weeks publishing the cat drug black market series, which told the story of a cure for a fatal feline disease and the underground Facebook community that sprang up to distribute it. And today we are going to close that series out with one final bonus episode.

For the time being, I think we're done for a little while with the cat stuff. But before we wrapped, we wanted to share the perspective of one cat owner, or pet parent, as the FIP Warriors call them. Like Marlena, this pet parent had never heard of the disease feline infectious parotinitis

before her new kitten was diagnosed. To say nothing of, GS-441-524, the illegal drug that is known to treat FIP. But unlike Marlena's cat Otto, who is doing spectacularly well today, this woman's cat did not make a full recovery. Now, for any anxious cat lovers out there, her cat did recover, but he still suffers from some complications today. We will get into it in the episode.

But this experience was so harrowing that this past, pet parent tells us that she threatened to sue the owner of the GS brand that she felt nearly killed her cat. And the company quietly settled with her out of court. What she thinks is that the brand was under-concentrating the GS, which you might remember from episode two, while overdosing on GS is almost impossible. Giving a cat a steady supply of under-concentrated medication can be pretty harmful. It can trigger relapses, or it can just make the treatment stop working altogether. And that is exactly what happened with her cat, captain. And, you know, not to sound like a broken record here, but it's worth saying again that these black market drugs did save

the lives of hundreds of thousands of cats. But, you know, it didn't save all of them. And those stories matter, too. So, without any further ado, here is that conversation. It is heartbreaking and disturbing. But also, thanks to the woman telling it, it is unexpectedly funny, warm, and uplifting. So my first question is if you could introduce yourself and tell us where you're speaking from. My name is Doyne Nugent, and I am currently living in the greater Toronto area in Canada. I've never heard the name Doina before. Where does it come from? I'm a bit of a mix. So on my dad's side, I'm Irish-French. On my mother's side, I'm Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek. You are a bit of a mix. And what do you do for a living? I'm a graduate instructor at

university, and I am also a research assistant at the Faculty of Health. What do you teach? I teach communications. Okay. All right. Have you always been a cat lover? Yes. I grew up surrounded by cats. I am told that I had a babysitter cat called Nanny, who would sleep with me in my cradle when I was a baby, and she basically wouldn't budge. So I don't have any memory of that, but she basically slept with me. And my auntie, you know. Can you tell us about your cat, captain? What's he like? We adopted him in January three years ago. and he was a three-month-old little piece of gray fluff. It wasn't actually me who picked him.

It was my partner. It was just one of those things. He saw it, and it had to be captain. And I was like, oh, can we get a bigger one, please? So he was very tiny, and his full name is Captain Prince Tango. What does that name mean? Is it like call letters? Like, what is that?

Well, the word, so first initially we're going to call him Prince. Okay. And then we have a boat, a racing sailboard called Blue Tango. So that's where the Tango comes from. And then, of course, it had been decided that he was going to go sailing with us at some point. Yes, I know. We were fortunate that he likes the boat, actually. He loves me.

Wow. He loves it. My cats would lose their minds. He loves the boat. It's his boat. Everybody knows it's his boat. We have the big captain and we have the little captain. That's very funny.

When did you first notice that something was wrong with captain? And when you took him to the vet, what did the vet say? We adopted them in early January. And by the, I would say, middle of March, maybe even a little bit earlier, we realized he was getting bigger and bigger. His tummy was getting more and more bloated. And we just thought initially he was putting on. weight. So we thought, you know what, he has a vet appointment coming up in a couple of weeks. We should be fine to wait. But then he was getting bigger and bigger. And it was becoming obvious that he was also very skinny because his bones were starting to stick out. So he was like a skeleton with a huge tummy. Oh. And that we started to realize that this is not normal. I mean, that something was going. We were still hoping that at the worst, we would get told off for overfeeding him, you know.

You know, because he's a big, you know, he's just getting very fat. So that was kind of our best. We had a horrible feeling that was something else going on, but we didn't know what. And so the night before I dropped him off to have his neuter, so this would have been on the 29th, 30th of March, dropped him off for his neuter, dropped him off at the rescue. And the head of the rescue, Shirley, who we adopted him from, took one look at him and said,

oh, I think this is FIP. What did you know about FIP at the time? Anything? Nothing. Zero. I had never heard of it. I've had, I mean, I'm 64. I've had cats all my life. I've never heard of it, ever. But of course, as soon as you Google, it's 100% fatal, right? So, you know, I went into a tailspin, as you can imagine. and he came back to us the next morning in a really bad condition. We did not think he would make it through the first night because he had gone into shock.

It was horrible. It was horrible. I walked up and down with him all night, you know, willing him to keep fighting. We were told that there was a black market treatment available. injections and the rescue had already treated one other cat. They were currently treating another cat and they had some GS vials at the rescue and they were willing to help us get started with injections and they also connected us to an online Facebook group called Warriors and yeah and they were we were told that this was basically the only way to source us medication and to get help

for him. And then we actually officially started treatment, the first injection, on April the first. What year was this? Three years ago. Okay, so 22. Yeah, 22. Yeah. So Doina was sort of lucky at this point. Like, even though Captain was really not doing very well, she says that the rescue where he was being treated had some extra vials of GS on hand and were able to get him started on the treatment ASAP, which is crucial with FIP. also crucially, the rescue told her she'd need to procure more medication to complete the 12-week treatment cycle. And for that, they connected her with FIP Warriors. But not the FIP Warriors you're thinking of, not the one founded by Robin Kintz or led by any of the other characters

you've heard in the past few episodes. This was FIP Warriors Canada, which was an affiliate of the FIP Warriors in the United States. It had regular contact with the group in the United States. But it was run by its own cast of characters with its own set of rules, its own set of obstacles, and, you know, its own drama, of course. But it also had some of the same vibes, which is to say that like Marlena, when Duano was contacted by FIP Warriors Canada, she also felt kind of creeped out. Volunteers were contacting me on Facebook. I didn't know who these people are. They have fake Facebook profiles. It's a cat picture, you don't know who these people are, but they're the only people who can help you.

What is it like to feel like you're putting the life of your beloved pet in the hands of someone who you don't know who they are or what their motives are or whether they'll actually be able to help you? I don't think I have ever felt so scared and so terrified and so helpless and so much despair in my entire life. I tell people I basically cried for the first week. I really, you know, I went a bit nuts, I think, for a while because I didn't sleep. I wasn't eating. He was so ill. We didn't know every day whether he would make it to the next day or syringe feeding. I mean, it's 24-7, right? Looking back now, thinking back, how did I even manage to teach my classes? I don't even remember teaching my classes. I was so stressed out. Suddenly we're in a

chat and there's these people who tell us that they're our administrator and we need to do this and we need to get steroids and we need to do that and this is the website we had to sign a waiver and of course you sign everything what choice do you have right without a waiver you don't get any medication i don't know who these people are i'm a research assistant i'm very comfortable reading research i basically spent the nights the next couple of nights reading every piece of research that I could find, but Dr. Peterson, you know, all the research on GS, YGS is not legally available to us because of the patent issue. But at that point, still, my lifeline was the chat that Warriors Canada had set up for us, and they were my only source of information. This is where you

get your medication from. The links are there. The password is there. You can't do anything on your own, right? Everything is delivered by UPS. So you're completely dependent on them. Can you tell me a little bit about the chat? What was it like in there? It was weird. You know, I have a science background and a psychology background.

And it was, you know, I mean, it's social media, man. And you don't know who these people are. And there's some people on Facebook telling me to inject. What they tell me is GS into, I know what GS is. That wasn't the scarier part. I had read all the research. I knew that it was actually a very effective antiviral at that point. But I don't know what I'm getting, you know, delivered by UPS.

It has some pink pretty packaging and it has some other information on it. It doesn't identify what it is because it has to get through customs. That's what I'm told, right? I'm handing over my credit card constantly $3,000 here, $4,000 here. $4,000? I did not realize that was the cost of this. We were told that the minimum cost to treat him would be about $8,000 to $10,000. You might remember from episode one that in the beginning, like starting in 2019,

GS vials were very expensive. sometimes nearly $400 a vial, and treatment did, in some cases, cost near $10,000. But over time, as more black market suppliers popped up and demand soared, prices generally came down by a lot. By 2022, vials could be as much as $120, but could be as low as $40. But even then, there were also a lot of other costs associated with FIP, especially if there were complications. Plus, you know, all the vet visits to figure out what's wrong and, you know, if the treatment is going right. So it's quite possible, Duena was told this would cost thousands of dollars. But I think this is a good opportunity to mention that some of these details of her

exchanges with FIP Warriors Canada admins, we weren't able to confirm since we focused our reporting primarily on the U.S. Warriors. That being said, much of what she told us generally tracked with our timelines and other experiences we've heard of. And again, I think this story is really important to hear because of what happened after she signed the FIP Warriors Canada waiver on the dotted line, handed her credit card over, and started injecting captain with GS. He's not responding to the medication at all. We're told we should be getting better, but it's not.

So we increase the dumps, right? So now I'm going to run out of medication. So, but I need a cold. to order. So that takes another 24 to 36 hours until the lead admin comes back, chooses to come back on to give me the code so I can order. Oh, it's unbelievable. It's constant, right? Then there's a delay with UPS. So you're constantly on knife edge as to whether you will have enough to inject tomorrow. Looking back at my notes, and I kept very deep, I'm a former professional athlete, so I had 19 years of being a professional athlete, I kept very meticulous training diaries. I record stuff.

Looking back at my notes now, I realized that I already knew after the first week that he was not responding to the treatment. So I was becoming increasingly desperate in the treatment chat asking for answers. If it's not working, how do we know it's working? Why are we not seeing any fluid absorption? Why is his tummy size still ballooning? He was going up, up, up. and they were like, okay, it takes a couple of weeks, and I'm being told that I just have to trust the process. And they do give you glowing reports, and you see the success stories. And they kept telling me that they had data about how effective this education, this particular brand. The other thing that was actually atypical in my situation apparently was I was never offered.

normally you're apparently given a brand list. I was never given a brand list. At this point, Dwayna told us she didn't really have any other options, but to continue relying on her warrior's admins for support. And so she does. Even as her gut is telling her, something is not right.

Even as captain's condition seems to keep getting worse. So the first month or month and a half, we did regular abdominal fluid draining. That's how we kept him alive. Every 10 days, she would brain a couple of hundred of milliliters of fluid. There were vast amounts of fluid in there. We probably think at least two liters. Oh, my God.

I know. He was like a balloon ready to pop. So, yeah, basically most of the day went on syringe feeding, supportive feeding, running around to make vet appointments ordering medication and realizing increasingly that my treatment admin have actually no basic understanding of biology. And that was what scared me the most. Like, I have a background in physiology.

Of course. How long was he sick before he started to show signs of progress? There were no signs of progress for two months. Two months? More than two months. So when you're asking me, what am I doing? In the meantime, I'm reading all the research that I can find in the world. I'm contacting all the researchers.

I'm emailing everybody. I'm reaching out to everybody. I need the best people in the world on my team, not the dumbest people in the world. So I'm reaching out to Dr. Peters. I'm reaching out to all the people who authored the studies. I reached out for help everywhere. I reached out to other groups, other organizations, other black market groups, because the group would not let me change brand. And according to Dr. Peterson's research, if the drug isn't working, the first thing that you do is you change brands, because the brand might be bad, okay? Because, you know, they're unregulated, right? I was not given the option. I kept asking for a different brand. I was not given the option.

They told me this was the best one. I didn't even know how to get other brands. I mean, I kept saying to them, where would, what, like, I don't know what other brands to get. It's just like you Google, right? So I'm talking, I'm emailing all kinds of people, researchers, other black market dealers, I guess, for a wonderful better reason. I'm being told that a certain brand, Aura is quite good. So then I'm like, I want Aura. Well, it's not available in Canada.

I said, I don't care. I want Aura. And they were like, okay, we'll get you Aura. And then another week passes. I'm like, I need to get some aura. Well, we, you know, blah, blah. So then they said, well, they're going to put us on pills so that we went on pills. And, of course, the pills come with another regiment where you're fasting one hour before, fasting one hour after.

So the pills are needed to be done every 12 hours. Again, he's not responding. We're going down to the vet every week, having some fluid drained. So in the meantime, I'm picking up contact with a couple of researchers who then I find out are actually treatment admin in the U.S. Warriors Group, the Warriors 5.0. And I reached out to one of them. I found her on a research website. And I said, would you agree to help me? And she said, of course.

So now basically what we have is we have my real treatment chat is with my researcher. And then we have the official treatment chat, which is with Warriors Canada. So all the real stuff is going on in a separate chat that they don't know. they cannot know about, because they would cut me off, right? So it has to be in secret. And so after a couple of weeks of back and forth, they agree that we are probably seeing drug resistance at this point. He's resistant to GS, or at least the brand.

Finally, after a lot of arguing, they finally let me switch over to another brand of pills. Okay. That's two months in. And that brand of pills is the thing that does it? We saw a small response, but not the response you're looking for. And again, drug resistance is the several pattern. You start on a new treatment. It responds for a few days.

Then you flatline. Then you increase the dose. It responds. You flatline. You know, that's the pattern generally of drug resistance because the virus has now had two months to get used to GS. And now the GS is the better GS, which presumably has more GS in the GS,

because it is about concentration. But we were doing already such a high dose. There really wasn't much higher for us to go. Because we were doing 12 GS pills a day. We were going through about $1,500 U.S. of pills per week. Oh, my gosh. A conservative estimate.

Right? So at this point, we're trying to fundraise as well. I've never fundraised in my life. You know, I've always been raised that you're supposed to deal with your own stuff. You know what I mean? You don't ask other people for money. But it was turning, we were starting to realize this was going to be, you know, where do you stop?

We had initially said 10K, then we said 20K. Once you go beyond 20K, you stop counting, right? So what then happened was on Canada Day, he became very... You're going to have to help me out here as an American. Oh, sorry, 1st of July. First of July. First of July. Apologies, long weekend, of course.

Always pick a long wind. He gets, he stops being able to pee. Now, I know that within 24 to 36 hours, that would be fatal. So he got what was called FIC, feline, idiopathic cystitis. He's not able to pass urine. This is an emergency. They managed to unblock him. It's a really stressful surgery.

It was really scary. They thought he might die in the surgery. And that was the scariest two hours of our lives waiting for that phone call. So while we're in the emergency room, too, we run all these extra tests, according to our researcher. Because while we're there, we might as well do all these extra tests. It's determined that the GS, even the good GS or the better GS isn't working really anymore. So we have a choice. We can either keep increasing the dose and just keep treating and hope that at some point he responds,

or we can go big or go home. And I'm a go big or go home person. And I said, no, let's hit that virus hard. In this case, going big meant introducing another type of antiviral into captain's treatment regimen, a drug called GC 376. GC, as it's called, is sometimes used in cats that are unresponsive to GS, because it is a different resistance mechanism. According to research written by Dr. Niels Peterson in 2021, a combination treatment of G.S. and G.C. together can be successful for cats that build up a resistance against G.S. because of underconcentrated drugs or long-term exposure. So Doina decides that's what Captain's going to do. So now we have to add in another antiviral, G.C. 376. And fortunately, our person from California is able.

to access this. So this person from California that Doina keeps mentioning, I've been waiting to tell you this, but you guys do actually know her. Doina is talking about Nicole Jacques, who is featured in our second and third episodes. It was Nicole

that Doina found on this research website. Nicole, who began advising her through Captain's drug resistance, and Nicole, who eventually got Doina GC. Nicole and Dr. Peterson actually wrote that research paper on G.C. together. And when Nicole procured G.C. for captain, it seemed to be working, at least until

that well started to run dry. This is the end of the pandemic, and we have a global supply chain crisis. So my admin is trying to get GC in Israel, in Brazil. We're finding one vial here, one vial there. So I have a wide network of international contacts as a graduate instructor going back 25 years and also in China. And long story short, I find a pharmaceutical manufacturer in China and I connect with them and I say, are you able to make GC? And we get the GC. I get a ship to California, because through the university, just to be on the safe side, you know, at least they can have a look at it and tell me if they think it's legit. Captain becomes the first cat in North America to be injected with this new GC.

The standing joke between the pharmaceutical manufacturer and me is that one of the first conversations I had with him was, if this drug doesn't work, I will find you. His answer was, I understand. Well, that's very sweet. We're still friends. Anyway, we treated for 177 days. Wow. Instead of 84.

Over 200 injections. over 1,500 pills. The last 12 weeks, we were doing pills three times a day, so every time is fasting one hour, and injections twice a day. So basically we're doing FIP medication five times a day. And between all the other medication, I'm getting up in three o'clock in the morning.

He's getting gabapentin, he's getting buprenorphine to sedate him, because at this point, he's big and strong, and he fights us. And so I'm getting up at three to give meds. We give meds at five. We give meds at six. We give meds at seven. Drugs again at three o'clock in the afternoon. Drugs again at five.

Drugs again at 6 p.m. It's nonstop. It's basically that's all we did for 12 weeks. So, anyway, long story short, he was fine. He's on medication. He will be on medication for the rest of his life. We have special diet. He needs laxative to keep him regular. We have to be very careful that he doesn't get blocked because, of course, that will be fatal. What a harrowing story. So in this period of time where you're dealing with this crazy situation, were you like looking for recourse, like to report sellers? Oh, okay. No, at that point, I mean, the most important thing is saving his life. Going after them comes afterwards.

So while all this is happening, Doina is pretty public about her awful experience. She'd made an Instagram for Captain and had been posting about his symptoms, his resistance, his treatment, and now his progress. She wanted other pet parents dealing with FIP to have a resource, to know what to look for when things didn't seem right, to have a vocabulary to describe drug resistance. But despite all the details she shared, Duena said she'd never mentioned the name of the drug that Captain was using, the one she considered to be faulty. Until one day in December of 2022, when another cat owner in the FIP Warriors Canada group asked directly, what brand did Captain backslide on? And she just sort of said it. I've been playing nice, doing what I'm told in the groups, because I know I get kicked out,

but I'm now at the point where parents need to know. So finally, one parent asked me, and I mentioned the name of the brand in a comment. This post goes viral. People are sharing it. I did not know that. I did not know that. The next more is this, of course, in the middle of the night. You know, you make bad decisions in the middle of the night.

I was exhausted. I have been exhausted for five months. I don't think I've slept properly for five months. The next morning I find I'm blocked. And I now have all these parents messaging me and saying, oh my God, all your posts are gone. What happened? The FIP Warriors in Canada were not happy when Doina outed one of their main suppliers.

And actually, neither were the FIP Warriors in the U.S., which also used that supplier. An ex-admin from the U.S. group shared screenshots of a conversation between the two warrior groups captured in the fallout of realizing that this drug might have been bad. And in that conversation, Canada Warriors said they pulled Captain's original GS supplier from their list of recommended brands after seeing other cats fail to respond on it too. But they still didn't like how Doina had gone about it. Robin, who ran the U.S. group, especially didn't like it. She was so upset that she put Doina on what she called the Warriors' No Fly List, a handout

circulated inside the community, naming groups, brands, and individuals that the Warriors distanced themselves from. Doina's name was listed as someone who was, quote, of particular concern. Doina, meanwhile, had other things to focus on, because after she outed the supplier on Facebook, she got a call from them. 24 hours later, we get a phone call from the manufacturer, basically wanting to know how we can get this under control. So I was told that I, in the chat, I was told I had no recourse because I had signed a waiver.

And I'm like, really, dude, have you ever seen a waiver stand up in court? I said, and anyway, I signed under duress. my baby is dying and you told me I won't get the medication to save my baby unless I sign the waiver. That's called duress. I said, give me my day in court. There's going to be no judge in the country that is going to find against me. And so then they said they would refund the treatment cost of the bad brand. I'm like, no, no, no, no.

What about all the other brands we had to use? At this point, we're about 40K in, right? at least 30k in. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm lucky I'm getting donations. But I mean, just all the hospital visits, come on, every hospital visit, you know, emergency is 3, 4K, right? I'm realizing that captain has side effects. He's going to need an enhanced level of care. This is not going to be cheap, right? And the manufacturer realized very quickly that I was not going to go away and he wanted me he basically wanted to shut me up right at that point in time i had to be realistic we had spent a huge amount of money this was unlikely to change in the near future because we had

other surgeries coming up and even though i didn't really want their money that's kind of how the legal system works right i mean i want them all to be in jail but you know somebody else is going to have to do that. So how did you end up dealing with it? They asked to settle out of court. Who was they, though? Ah, the manufacturer. The manufacturer.

The manufacturer settled out of court. It wasn't anything to do with the FIP Warriors or anything. Well, he provided the medications. They sold the medication to me. So how much did you settle for? 30K. I mean, it's still a pretty penny out of your pocket,

but considering what you'd already spent. Oh, yeah, it's not even close. So what basically happened, and I mean, it all happened so fast, was that I had to come up with receipts. They wanted receipts. So I spent an hour before that phone call, frantically going through my laptop.

And I know there was way more money that we had spent, but I basically had to have an hour to find all the receipts and submit what I could find. And it came up to 29,000 something. You know, you don't want their dirty money. But then ironically, that's how our legal system works. It's the civil courts, right? It's always about money, isn't it? And ironically, afterwards, I sort of figured to myself that probably also money was really the only way to hurt them the most, because that's

all they cared about. So what kind of agreement did you sign with him? Just like a monetary agreement? There was no non-disparagement or non. There was a non-disparagement clause. He asked for a non-disparagement clause. I am not allowed to mention his name, and I'm not allowed to mention the brand name. Oh, okay. I was going to say, you're kind of disparaging his company, but I guess if I don't know what his company is, then it's not really disparagement. Now that I think about it. I have been careful to not violate the conditions of the agreement.

He also agreed to pay 50% of captains medical costs for the following 12 months. Oh, wow. Okay. Dwayna told us this wasn't exactly the outcome she was looking for. She hated putting a dollar amount on Captain's life. But looking back now, she can see the impact his story had. Because of Doyna's persistence and her willingness to speak up, Captain's story spread quickly in the FIP Warriors community,

both in Canada and in the USA, both among pet parents and admins. And he became one of those stories that pushed both Dwayna and other advocates to fight for change? So as a result of all of this, it's very obvious to me very quickly that the only way to suck the oxygen out of the black market is to get regulated treatment. That's the only way, right? Permanently, that's how you make them irrelevant. And as you know, that's exactly what happened. Just over two years after Doinus Cat Captain was diagnosed with FIP, a group of researchers, pharmacists, and cat advocates worked to get GS available in compounding pharmacies across the United States and Canada. Vets in Canada can also now legally prescribe

GS for their patients, and Health Canada, their version of the FDA, allows it. And although that's not necessarily relevant to Captain anymore, Duena has continued her involvement in the FIP community, connecting researchers and advocates, advising pet parents, and sharing her story in case it helps anyone else. My favorite quote is Muhammad Ali. Impossible is not a fact. Impossible is an opinion. Impossible is a dare. Impossible is nothing. That's been my life quote for the last 30 years. It's on my Facebook page. I truly, truly believe that. Impossible is nothing. It's a challenge. Thank you so much, Joanna. That was really fascinating. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Hyperfixed.

The show is produced and edited by Seri Saffer Sukkenek, Amor Yates, and Emma Cortland. It was engineered by Tony Williams. Scoring for this week's episode is by me. And I am Alex Goldman. I also hosted the show. You might have noticed that. Fun fact for this week is that the reason cats spread their arms and legs when they're falling is because it causes wind resistance like a parachute,

and it slows their descent, thereby harming them less when they finally hit the ground. Which is kind of amazing. That's pretty good evolutionary action right there. Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening. We will see you next week with a non-cat-related episode. If that is your preference,

congratulations. If you are upset about that, my apologies. Thank you.