It has been 3 weeks since I last posted, and I am still not quite ready. Posting from Death Valley itself is challenging due to the bad (well, almost non-existent) data service there, but that isn’t my real excuse. Turns out Lily, the cat who has been traveling with us for 12 years, turned very quickly into a critical care patient. We left DVNP, headed to Needles, CA and started calling vets on Friday, 19 February, after she showed distress Thursday night. In these COVID days, it is really hard to find a vet open on Friday and taking new patients! We expanded our search gradually, and we ended up with an emergency vet in Lake Havasu City, AZ. Blood work showed our fears were true: Lily had moved from having serious kidney disease to being in kidney failure. They gave her antibiotics, just in case, plus pain meds and bags of IV fluids we injected subcutaneously. After a few days it was obvious nothing was going to help, so we headed home. I just wanted to make it home before she left us, and we managed, though it took two fluid injections a day to get us there. We had her euthanized with our home vet on Monday. Here is the last picture I took of her, staring out the motorhome window at some bird. This had to be her favorite activity.
I am going off to cry a bit now. I will post more later.