Road Trip Day 1: Your cat has died of dysentery

On the first day of the drive from Seattle to New Hampshire, there was a moment in Eastern Washington where I thought that this must be what hell feels like. Ashley was asleep, the iPod was playing some tired David Bowie song I'd heard a million times before, and the air was so hot it brought up those weird mirages on the concrete. For a solid twenty minutes I felt like a zombie. This is what hell feels like.

I wasn't the only overheated one. We stopped at a gas station Subway and ate sandwiches in the shade of the building (near a sign that read the time and the temp—107 degrees!). Our cat, Clementine, was in her carrier, acting kind of drunk and weird. Her nose had white flecks all over it and she was rolling around over and over again. She had pushed her towel all the way to the back and was lying on the bare plastic. We gave her an ice cube and moved on.

In an hour or so, we noticed her panting. We didn't get a picture of a cat panting, but it looks a lot like this:

Now imagine that but with the cuteness replaced by panic and fatigue, and you have a pretty good idea of what our cat looked like.

I had never seen a cat do this before, and it freaked me out. That can't be normal, right? I assumed she was dehydrated, but we couldn't get her to drink. About this time, the car was overheating from driving up a mountain in the Idaho panhandle so we pulled off into the Mullan Tree national historical site to give the car a rest and help our cat. We didn't know what to do (we weren't even sure she was dehydrated, although we assumed she must be), so we wound up holding her on her back, filling soda caps full of tiny cat-sized drinks of water and pouring them into her mouth. She looked pissed, licked the spilled water off her face, and fell asleep for a good five hours.

Later I looked up the symptoms. Turns out she was dehydrated—seriously dehydrated. If we had waited a few more hours we would have had to take her to a vet to get an IV, and since there's a severe lack of vets in the mountains of Idaho, our cat would probably have died.

Is it weird that this makes me feel somehow badass, like a pioneer crossing the country, enduring hardships, close to death? Like in Oregon Trail: Your cat is sick. Your cat has died of dysentery. Ashley drowned while fording the river. Well, the cat lives, and is currently climbing in and out of a box that I haven't unpacked yet.

If you want to know about dehydrated cats—and don't we all?—go here.