Last Updated on March 24, 2026 by admin
The flies were the first thing Keith Beja noticed.
Not the thinness — though Nicolas was barely there. Not the drooling — though it was constant, soaking his chin. It was the flies, settled on a living animal in the afternoon heat of a garden in the Philippines, as though they’d already decided his fate for him.
Keith and Ivy Cuebillas had never owned a cat. They had no carrier, no vet on call, no idea what they were looking at beyond the obvious: this cat had been struggling alone for a very long time, and he had found their garden.
October 2024. A decision. They stayed.
Why He Couldn’t Eat
Nicolas wasn’t just starving. The drooling that made him so hard to look at was a symptom of something specific: an indolent ulcer inside his mouth, caused by a condition called Eosinophilic Granuloma Complex. Every time he tried to eat, the lesion made it hurt. So he stopped eating. So he got thinner. So he became the kind of cat that flies find.
Eosinophilic Granuloma Complex is a group of inflammatory skin and mucosal conditions in cats. When it presents inside the mouth — as it did with Nicolas — it can cause lesions painful enough to stop a cat eating entirely. Left untreated, the weight loss compounds quickly.
Keith and Ivy had no cage to transport him. They arranged for a home-service vet to examine Nicolas right in the garden. The tests came back with two findings.
First: Nicolas had tested positive for Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, or FIV — a disease that spreads between stray unneutered males through bite wounds from territorial fights. Common among street cats in the Philippines. Not a death sentence.
Second: the Eosinophilic Granuloma Complex was the reason he couldn’t eat. They had a name for what was wrong. Now they needed to decide what to do about it.
The Manila Feline Center
They brought Nicolas to the Manila Feline Center, where vets ran cytology tests to confirm the EGC diagnosis. The tests revealed something else: dental problems were worsening the swelling in his lips. He needed dental prophylaxis. He needed a tooth extracted.
According to the MSD Veterinary Manual, Eosinophilic Granuloma Complex in cats typically responds well to steroid treatment — especially when dental disease contributing to inflammation is also addressed. That’s exactly what the vets at the Manila Feline Center did.
The treatment wasn’t immediate. The results weren’t guaranteed. Keith and Ivy went home from appointments unsure of what the next week would look like.
They kept going back.
Month Three
Somewhere around month three, Nicolas started to change.
The drooling slowed. The ulcer retreated. For the first time since he’d appeared in their garden, eating didn’t seem to hurt.
He started gaining weight. Slowly. Then more. Then, unmistakably.
By December 2025 — fourteen months after he first showed up covered in flies — Nicolas had gained 2.5 kilograms. He was eating dry kibble. The swelling in his lips had significantly improved. His eyes were brighter. His coat was growing in.
Keith and Ivy documented the transformation on Instagram. One video — showing the same cat across fourteen months, from frail and fly-covered to fed and healed — drew 269,000 views and over 40,000 likes. People who had never been to the Philippines were losing sleep over Nicolas. Comments came in from everywhere.
Something about the specificity of his recovery — the named condition, the named couple, the exact number of kilograms — made it feel real in a way that general rescue stories rarely do. GreaterGood covered his full transformation in detail, and the response confirmed what Keith and Ivy had suspected: people are hungry for proof that one act of ordinary decency can go somewhere.
Nine Cats
Here’s the thing about Keith and Ivy: Nicolas was supposed to be a one-time situation.
He wasn’t.
Caring for an FIV-positive stray with a mouth too sore to eat — arranging the home-service vet, the Manila Feline Center visits, the steroid treatment, the dental work — changed how they saw the pushin around them. That’s the local term for Philippine domestic shorthairs, the cats that move through every neighborhood in the country, often invisible to the people passing by.
Keith and Ivy started seeing them differently.
Today they have nine rescued cats. Nicolas was the first. You can follow their rescues at @bejacats on Instagram.
What the Story Actually Says
The couple who found Nicolas had no experience. They improvised the first vet visit because they didn’t own a cage. They approved a tooth extraction for a cat they’d known six weeks.
They went from zero cats to nine in just over a year.
Nicolas is now 2.5 kilograms heavier than the day they met him. He can eat. He has eight siblings. He found all of it because two people in a garden in Manila chose not to look away from the flies.
What’s your cat’s name? Drop it in the comments 👇