We Were Three Hours From the Nearest Vet When Our Puppy Started Seizing

We'd had Tucker, our border collie puppy, for about five months when we started full-time RVing. He was healthy, energetic, completely normal — right up until the morning he wasn't.

We were boondocking on BLM land in eastern Nevada, the kind of spot where you pick your site specifically because there's nobody else around for miles. Beautiful. Also, in hindsight, a terrible place to be when your puppy suddenly falls over and starts convulsing.

It lasted maybe 90 seconds, which does not sound long until you are on the ground next to your puppy timing it on your phone with your hands shaking. When it stopped, he was disoriented, walking into things, drooling. My husband already had the truck keys out, ready to just drive — problem was, "drive where" had no good answer. The nearest town with any kind of vet was almost three hours on gravel roads.

I opened the Waggle app because we'd set it up specifically for this kind of scenario before we left on this trip, and got a vet on video within a few minutes even with weak signal — the call dropped to audio-only twice but held. I described exactly what happened, how long it lasted, what he looked like afterward. The vet walked us through checking his gum color, his temperature with the thermometer from our first aid kit, and asked a string of questions about anything he could have gotten into — antifreeze, any plants, whether we'd used any new flea/tick product recently. We had, actually, two days before.

She couldn't diagnose the cause over video, and was clear about that. But she helped us figure out this wasn't a "drive three hours right now at all costs" situation versus a "get him seen within the next 12-24 hours" situation, which is a completely different plan when you're that far from anywhere. She gave us specific things to monitor for that would mean escalate immediately — a second seizure, blue-tinted gums, seizure lasting over 5 minutes — and we drove to the nearest town at a normal pace instead of a full panic, got him in front of an in-person vet by early afternoon.

Turned out to be a reaction to the new flea treatment, not epilepsy, not anything chronic. We switched products and he's never had another episode.

What still gets me is how different that morning would have felt without someone to talk to. We would have either done the three-hour gravel-road drive in a blind panic for something that didn't need it, or sat there paralyzed not knowing if waiting was dangerous. Neither of those is a good place to be with a seizing puppy and one bar of signal.

If you're living the RV life full-time, what we've learned about vet access after six months on the road covers more of this. And if you're heading somewhere hot, heatstroke is the other scenario that sneaks up fast in an RV — worth reading before you're in it, not during.