MOSES LAKE — It’s thirty minutes before midnight on a Friday night, and two veterinarians over a hundred miles apart are in their beds.

In Moses Lake, Dr. Jesyka Morrison of Pioneer Veterinary Clinic, who isn’t on call, gets the first call. It’s an officer with the Moses Lake Police Department.

“Chief has been shot.”

Seconds later, Morrison is out of the door.

There’s no protocol for a situation like this, no one on call for this sort of crisis, she said in an interview Wednesday. But she's Chief's veterinarian and she’s friends with many local officers, and she is the first person they turned to.

It’s immediately clear when she arrives at the clinic that Chief is going to need more care than he can find in Moses Lake. He’s been shot through the eye after a chase with an alleged robbery suspect, who was killed in return fire by Chief’s handler, Officer Nick Stewart. He’s losing a lot of blood, and it’s unclear whether fragments from the bullet have gone through the skull.

For a time, everything is a whirlwind of movement and adrenaline. Morrison, Dr. Jennifer Brown and other vet staff pressure wrap the eye to slow the bleeding, put Chief under sedation, insert a breathing tube to open up an airway, give him fluids through an IV placed under the skin around his shoulders and start making calls.

It isn’t just vet staff making calls, Morrison said — police are desperately calling around for the closest available Life Flight transport while she and other staff make calls to Washington State University.

Again, there is no protocol. WSU isn’t called because someone’s planned for this scenario, Morrison said, but because of the type of time-critical decision-making that medical professionals are known for in life-or-death situations. There are specialty facilities in the Seattle area that might be able to do what WSU’s veterinary hospital can do, but Pullman is a bit closer.

Looking at Chief, Morrison knows that minutes may be the difference in how the night ends.

The calls go out. In her bed around 131 miles away, Dr. Emilia Terradas, a resident in veterinary Emergency and Critical Care at WSU, picks up the phone. On call that night, she prepares for Chief’s arrival, unsure that he’ll be alive by the time he arrives, she said in an interview.

Back in Moses Lake, the clinic has done everything in its capacity. It’s time for Chief to be transported to the airfield.

Stewart is unable to travel with him, due to the investigation underway into the suspect’s death, as is standard in such situations. Instead, to Morrison’s abiding relief, another K9 handler with the Moses Lake Police Department, Officer Brad Zook, volunteers to come. Adrenaline pumping, Morrison grabs every loose item she can carry for every possible contingency.

A bag of fluids clipped to the back of the cage, Chief is placed in the back of a patrol vehicle, and Morrison and Zook speed off to the airfield. They’re told the plane will get there in 15 minutes.

It doesn’t.

Standing there after midnight, watching for small lights to appear out of the night sky that, minute by minute, still haven’t arrived, Morrison is filled with helplessness. Zook lays down in the backseat with Chief, telling him it’s going to be all right, trying to comfort man and dog alike. The seconds tick by.

Days later, trying to describe those moments, the sudden stillness amid the desperate excitement, Morrison will struggle for words, trying to express the fear she felt and the gratitude she would feel for Zook making sure she wasn’t alone. In the moment, there’s nothing to be done.

But 45 minutes later, the lights appear, and a Life Flight plane lands. Morrison will later learn that it hadn’t come slowly to Moses Lake — the nearest available plane was in Portland, and had come as quickly as it could.

The poor medics onboard the plane are trying to help however possible, Morrison said, but critically injured canines aren’t exactly in their wheelhouse. Morrison, who only hours later had been ready to fall asleep, is in charge.

They board the plane.

Although she’s sitting still, there’s another flurry of motion. Chief is hooked up to machines that will monitor his vital signs, and when she’s not reviewing the readout from those machines, she’s texting vet technicians in Pullman, trying to coordinate immediate next steps for when the plane lands.

Things begin to take a turn for the worse. Minutes from Pullman, Chief’s heart rate is dropping.

But the ambulance is there waiting for them, and Chief gets loaded. Morrison and Zook are ushered into the lobby of WSU’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital. There's nothing more for them do. It’s about 2:45 in the morning.

Terradas is ready for Chief when he arrives. The 3 1/2-year-old German shepherd had been given pain killers, but he’s anxious and he’s afraid. Terradas and the team around her get to work on the immediate work of stabilizing Chief.

There are a number of immediate and short-term concerns. It isn’t clear if the bullet has damaged the brain, which could cause seizures or swelling. The bullet has also exited through the back of his mouth, shattering his jawbone and causing the mouth and esophagus to swell, and there is a serious risk of him choking.

They start him on antibiotics. They start a blood transfusion. When Chief begins to wake up he struggles to breathe, so they put him back under sedation.

The sun rises on Pullman, and Morrison and Zook are both still sitting in the lobby, trying and failing to get some sleep, waiting for news.

The 12-hour mark comes and goes. Terradas notes that Chief isn’t showing signs of increased cranial pressure, a major milestone given the concern about brain injury in those critical first days. His breathing tube is removed, and he manages to maintain his breathing, a massive improvement from the night before. He receives a blood transfusion.

Stewart makes his first visit, kept to a short 10 minutes that first morning, Terradas said. That evening, he comes again, again for ten minutes. Under sedation, Chief doesn’t show that he knows his human is there.

After the first 24 hours, Terradas begins to believe that Chief may pull through. She’s been doing the job long enough, however, that she doesn’t say it out loud. In a post to social media that night, Moses Lake police write that “the woods are dark and cold, and he is nowhere near out of them yet, but at least he is walking.”

But by Sunday morning, optimism is starting to trickle in. Chief’s swelling has gone down, his bleeding is under control and his blood work looks good.

And when Stewart visits him, Chief notices.

A CT scan is scheduled for Monday. Though tests have been run to try to locate any bullet fragments still in the wound, the CT scan will be able to show the veterinarians precisely where they are, what damage they caused, and what comes next.

The next day’s result shocks the veterinarians. The bullet had missed the brain completely. They realize the scope of the damage to his jaw, putting his mouth in a soft-muzzle while it heals, but they also realize that the wounds to his mouth are not severe enough to continue restricting him from food. After days of nothing but IV fluids, Chief is ravenous.

Come Tuesday, Chief is prepped for surgery, and his left eye is successfully removed. Though it sounds grisly, it’s a fairly simple surgery, and there appear to be no complications. The vets decide to leave some bullet fragments in his head, believing that they are unlikely to cause life-threatening harm and that the risk of invasive surgery outweighs the potential benefit.

But, with shaved bands around his legs, a few extra pieces of metal in his head, somehow looking both a little worse for wear yet also raring to chase a ball, Chief was discharged from the hospital.

Recalling the last few days Wednesday, Terradas and Morrison both noted a number of times that things could have gone differently. If it had taken just another 30 minutes to arrive at WSU, Morrison said, or if the bullet had been angled just a little differently, Chief would have been the first K9 officer killed in the line of duty in the county.

But thanks to Morrison, Terradas, the teams around them and a lot of luck, Chief was able to hop into a police vehicle parked outside of the veterinary hospital Wednesday morning.

In the middle of a police escort dozens of cars deep coming together from around a half dozen different law enforcement agencies, Chief came home.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.