Camping With Two Cats When One Started Limping

Our cats, Sage and Juniper, travel with us in the RV most of the year. They're both indoor-outdoor within our fenced camp setup, which has worked fine for two years — until the night Sage came back from exploring around our site limping badly on her front paw, holding it up entirely, not putting any weight on it.

We were at a state forest campground with no cell signal beyond a single flickering bar, about 45 minutes from the nearest town, and no idea if that town even had a vet who saw cats on short notice on a Thursday night.

I managed to get the Waggle app to load on that one bar — it took a couple of tries and the video kept freezing, but audio held steady enough to actually talk through what was going on. The vet asked me to try to look at the pad of her paw for anything visible — a thorn, a cut, swelling — while my husband held her still and pointed the camera close during the moments the connection worked. We found what looked like a small puncture, probably a thorn or sharp stick.

She walked us through checking for anything still embedded, cleaning it with what we had in our first aid kit, and specifically what signs would mean this needed an in-person vet that night rather than the next morning — spreading redness, her chewing at it obsessively, or her refusing to put weight on it at all after 24 hours. We didn't see any of that. By the next afternoon she was walking normally again.

What stuck with me was how different this felt from our first year RVing, when we didn't have any way to get an actual answer in a moment like this. We would have either driven 45 minutes on a dark forest road hoping the town vet was open, or sat there all night worrying without knowing if we should.

If you're dealing with something less minor than a thorn — like a possible snake bite — that's its own situation with different urgency. And if you're new to traveling with pets full-time, here's the bigger picture on vet access we've learned after six months on the road.

Sage has since decided the thorn bush is now enemy territory and gives it a wide berth on every walk.