Sometimes things turn up in the last place you look... or the first place you expect.
A man named Nick Day proposed to his then-girlfriend Shaina with a beautiful diamond ring over two decades ago, and Shaina promptly flushed it down the toilet. Shaina wasn't entirely sure that was what had happened to the missing ring, but she had enough of a hunch that she sifted through the contents of the septic tank searching for the wayward diamond jewelry.
Twenty-one years later, Shaina's hunch would be proven correct when a plumber found the ring, not in the septic tank, but in the toilet.
It was 2002 when the story of the lost-and-found missing ring began. Shortly after Nick proposed to Shaina, the ring went missing during a visit to his mother's house.
Shaina confessed to losing the ring and even suspected it had gone into the toilet, as Nick explained:
She came to me one day and said, 'I think I lost my ring.' She said, 'It was on the counter, now it's gone, and I think I may have flushed it down the toilet on accident.'
Shaina clearly felt bad about losing that ring because she took drastic measures to try to retrieve it. Can you imagine sifting through the entire contents of a large septic tank searching for a relatively tiny ring? That's what Shaina did, but to no avail, as she described:
I climbed down into the septic tank so we could pump every bit of it through a strainer to try to find it. No luck.
It wasn't until twenty-one years later a plumber located the ring, still in perfect condition, lodged within the very toilet where Shaina thought she lost it before her wedding. The plumber discovered the ring while replacing the toilet after Nick's mother decided she wanted a new one.
In an incredible stroke of luck, he found the ring. Nick's mother Renee described the moment the plumber told her about his find:
He said, 'Do you think it's Shaina's ring?' and I looked at it again, and I went, 'Oh my God, yes!'
Nick's mother Renee and her husband had the ring professionally cleaned, packaged it in Christmas wrapping, and presented it to the couple for Christmas. Nick explained the moment he and his wife Shaina saw the ring for the first time in over two decades:
They brought this out. It was wrapped up in a little Christmas bag, so we opened it up, and both of us knew exactly what it was.
Shaina recalled the special moment that brought her to tears:
It was kind of an ugly cry. I sat there, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is my ring. This is my ring.' I'm wiping my eyes, and mascara is going everywhere.
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