A four-year-old dog is alive after being run over by a vehicle and having gone missing for almost 24 hours.
Amanda Willner was woken up to a frantic phone call from a friend saying they crashed their vehicle and needed help.
“She rolled her car and was trapped in a river upside down,” says Willner.
Willner and her boyfriend Cody Loughran rushed out the door and so did their Wheaten terrier poodle named Stanley.
“I started the truck and put it in gear,” says Willner.
Not realizing, Stanley was under the truck.
“I heard Cody screaming and he was screaming, ‘You just ran over the dog,’” she recalls.
Suddenly, one emergency became two when Willner realized what happened.
“I was thinking I was the worst person in the world. Just absolute despair,” she says.
Her friend was OK, but somehow Stanley bolted off and the search began for the missing dog.
Both ROAM and FLED, organizations that help reunite owners with their missing pets, jumped in to help and more than 100 people came to search.
“We couldn’t believe how many people shared the post on Facebook,” says Willner.
Loughran says they searched all over the Kinsol Trestle area and spent the entire day looking for him but he was nowhere to be found.
“I definitely thought we were never going to see our dog again,” says Willner.
Every half an hour through the night they checked the back porch for Stanley, hoping he would return home.
"He turned on the floodlight instead of just the regular porch light and he came out of the bush somewhere, crawled out onto the deck,” says Willner.
Cody screamed with relief and joy.
“We picked him up and carried him to the car and off we went to Waves Veterinarian in Langford," says Willner.
Once at the clinic, they were told Stanley had air in his chest cavity outside of his lungs, had swelling in his liver and kidneys and had a fractured jaw.
“They said, ‘For getting run over by a truck and being in the shape he is, he’s in outstanding shape,’” says Willner.
Stanley is now recovering at home and is supposed to take it easy, but you would have no idea what he went through by just looking at him playing.
Friends of the couple created a GoFundMe to cover Stanley's vet bills and they decided to donate the remaining money to FLED and ROAM.
“Overall, we got quite lucky,” says Loughran.
