After a harrowing 16 hours on the run, and a community effort to help bring her home, a 1-year-old goldendoodle named Lucy is back with her family.

The cream-colored pooch went in for minor eye surgery last Tuesday afternoon and ended up spending the night hunkered down in a thistle patch along a partially frozen creek.

Medford resident Stephanie Valentine, Lucy’s “mom,” dropped the pooch off at a clinic on Table Rock Road around noon last Tuesday. Instructed to come back between 3 and 4 p.m., Valentine picked one of her kids up from school and showed up to the clinic around 3:30 p.m.

Excited to see her pup, Valentine said she was devastated when the vet informed her that Lucy had escaped his grip and slipped through an open gate. Valentine declined to identify the vet in an interview with the Rogue Valley Times, although the clinic location was disclosed on social media during the ordeal.

“We paid for her surgery and we were told to drive around to the back of the building to get Lucy. When we got to the back of the building, the vet appeared to have fallen over and had Lucy’s collar in his hand,” she said.

“Then he said Lucy had darted. … We immediately began calling her name and looking for her, but she was just gone. The whole pasture is green and she’s white… but I didn’t see her anywhere. My daughter started to cry, saying, ‘Where is Lucy?’”

The family searched for hours along Table Rock Road, both sides of Gregory Road, in horse pastures and vacant fields. With local shelters closed, Valentine filed a report with the sheriff’s department and alerted her husband, Wallace Valentine.

“My husband was in Bend working and I called him crying that the dog was lost,” she said.

After a couple of hours spent searching, Valentine decided to post to social media, in case Lucy had been picked up or reported found.

Advice on how to find the dog, as well as a handful of sightings, began showing up on social media immediately. Community members tagged family and friends who lived nearby. More than 1,000 Facebook users shared the post, some even leaving their homes to help search for Lucy.

“Somebody posted on my Facebook post and said her mom was on Table Rock Road and saw a white dog with a leash on, and that she darted and ran into a cow pasture near the vet clinic and then ran to the next building over,” Valentine said.

“I went to that house and, sure enough, the guy who lived there was like, ‘I saw a white dog running out by the cows.’ But he said it was really muddy back there, so he said he would put his boots on and go back and look for her. People were really kind.”

Nearby resident Kim Samitore, who offers horse boarding and riding lessons on her property, was tagged on Valentine’s post, alerting her to the situation.

“Everyone and their dog, literally, knows where I live, so I look on Facebook and people are tagging and tagging and tagging,” Samitore said.

“When I heard this dog was seen on my property, I went out there and I saw something jumping around, but it went into the thistle where you can’t really walk. It’s like 6-foot and 7-foot thistle.”

Samitore said she gave the family permission to search her pasture, though the sun was going down and temperatures were dropping. Also, Samitore has a horse named Lucy.

“I told them, ‘Just so you know, if you come back and start calling the name Lucy, I have a 31-year-old blind horse out in the field that we call for dinner,’ so if you don’t get your dog, you might get a blind horse!” Samitore said with a laugh.

With the sun setting and temperatures dropping, Valentine returned home with her kids. Wallace Valentine, who had returned home from Bend to search for the dog, stayed out until midnight.

“We had friends with cars looking for her. Community members riding their bikes all over. … We figured she was probably hunkered down somewhere. … We were holding on to hope, like maybe somebody had her and they were holding onto her until morning,” Valentine said.

“The bad thing is, the shelters don’t open until like 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. I told my husband, ‘The first thing I want to do is to check that horse pasture.’”

With permission from Samitore to check the field, Valentine and her husband walked along opposite sides of the creek.

“We were walking in horse manure. It was freezing cold. My husband was like, ‘I wanna walk the whole creek.’ We brought Chance — her dad — and we had her favorite squeaky toy and her squeaky ball, so he just kept squeaking it thinking she was gonna come out,” Valentine said.

“We finally saw a little white puff and my husband squeaked the toy again and then he saw her ears go up.”

Spotting the dog under a patch of thistle, Wallace Valentine hopped a barbwire fence and ran to the dog.

“She growled at first. Her eye was torn up, so she turned her head and looked out of her good eye,” she said.

“He said, ‘Lucy it’s Daddy!’”

Now home and recovering from her ordeal, Lucy is on antibiotics and pain medication with some follow-up appointments scheduled. Valentine said she was in awe of the community’s willingness to help a family — and dog — in need.

“Even when we were looking, there was a lady out there looking at the same time. She had bacon. She was messaging people to bring drones. It was really amazing,” she said.

“The support we got from everybody — people we didn’t even know — is insane. We’re so grateful and thankful. People who didn’t even know us, they cared. It was heartwarming. Nowadays we see so much negativity on social media … but if it wasn’t for the community seeing our story on Facebook, and wanting to help us, we would have never found her.”

Valentine added, “We had over 1,000 shares and all these messages in a matter of just a few hours … Now I feel like, anytime someone’s dog is missing, I’m there!”