Friday morning I packed up enough clothing for a long weekend, fished my cat from his hiding place under the bed (he hates road trips, with a passion), and set out on a six-hour drive to my parent’s house. We’ve been having incredibly stormy weather lately, so that morning the clear blue sky and intermittent puffy white clouds seemed like some special and undeserved gift. I’d also just turned in the two major and very scary projects I’d been stressing over at work, so with my iPod feeding episodes of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and “This American Life” to me over the car speakers and my cat sleeping in his carrier on the seat next to me, everything seemed aligned in my favor. I don’t remember the last time I was that care-free. I didn’t have to think about anything. I didn’t have to make any decisions. And I know the route from my place to my parents’ so well that I don’t even have to think about which lane to be in any more. Vacation had begun.

Three into my trip I realized the I hadn’t actually copied all the episodes of my radio shows onto my iPod. So I pulled off at a gas station, fired up my computer, and started transferring the files I needed. And just when I was chuckling at modern technology and how easy it is to make a good road trip even better… my cat let out a few distressed cries and then proceeded to gasp and pant with his mouth wide open.

It’s been two years since his last asthma attack (which was also his first asthma attack), but I recognized the signs. He was also spiking a fever. Suddenly the iPod, the blue sky, and puffy white clouds weren’t very interesting. I was three hours from my vet and three hours from my family’s vet, and Pippin was struggling to breathe.

With the help of my cell phone, my dad, and his internet connection, we located the phone numbers of 5 vets in the two small cities nearest me on the highway. But none of them had any openings. Openings? You have to schedule openings for a cat who can’t breathe? Each gave me other phone numbers to call, but pretty soon I’d called everyone in a 20 mile radius. So I called my dad again and told him I was going to start driving and to get back to me when he’d found a vet that could see me. Poor Dad. But he was a good sport and within 15 minutes had located a vet in a town 40 minutes from me, and had called up directions so that he could guide me in. Thank goodness for cell phones.

So a full hour after Pippin had started breathing strangely, I pulled into a teeny little vet clinic in the last real town for the next 70 or so miles. By this time the cat was simply breathing quickly and shallowly, not rasping and gasping like he had been, and I’d calmed down quite a bit. So I was able to carry him into the little front room of the vet clinic and more or less calmly wait for the vet to finish up with a previous patient (a large adolescent black lab).

The vet’s cat wandered up to great me and was only slightly put off by Pippin’s grumpy hisses. He sharpened his claws on the chair next to me, and then wandered off to stretch luxuriously in full view of my caged cat. A sign advertising a horse for sale hung on the wall. Lambing bottles lined the shelves. This wasn’t like my vet’s office…