Tammy Yergey has found her dog Tinker after eight months, by the way of a good samaritan who found the dog and helped reunite them after searching through lost dog ads.

You can call her the miracle dog.

Eight months after losing her Yorkshire terrier outside a Lawrence grocery store, Tammy Yergey was reunited with the little dog, Tinker.

“I just never expected to get her back,” Yergey said Thursday, as she held the scruffy, messy-faced dog. “It was just kind of our little miracle.”

Tinker went missing last St. Patrick’s Day — March 17 — during a family trip to a Lawrence grocery store. Someone either stole the dog from the family’s vehicle or it got out somehow.

Yergey immediately put an ad in the newspaper and thought she’d never again see the little dog she had a special bond with, the dog she took to work each day.

“She’s like my little shadow, where she follows me everywhere I go, I just can’t do anything without her not behind me; almost to where I’m tripping over her it’s so bad,” Yergey said. “It was really, really hard.”

But on Veterans Day, Yergey received a phone call from a woman who said she found a dog she thought might be hers — a dog that gets excited when someone’s getting dressed because it thinks a trip’s in store, the dog that has breast cysts on its belly.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this cannot be.’ There is just no way, eight months later that it’s my dog,” Yergey said.

When the stranger brought the dog to Yergey’s Lawrence office building, the dog got excited. Yergey and her co-workers stood by the window waiting to see if it could be Tinker.

“Sure enough it was her,” Yergey said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yay, it’s Tinker.’ Everyone was crying; it was just so cool.”

The anonymous dog finder said she found the dog a few days ago and went through a year’s worth of lost dog ads in the newspaper. Eventually she found an ad from March that matched Tinker’s description and contacted Yergey.

Though Yergey was a bit hurt Tinker didn’t immediately recognize her, she said the dog was well taken care of and in good spirits. The dog will be pampered during an appointment at the doggy salon Friday.