Couple recovers rings thought to have been flushed over 20 years ago

LAKELAND, Fla. (WSVN) – A Florida woman is flushed with joy after finding something valuable that she lost decades ago. Some gifts are just worth waiting for.

A Lakeland couple was getting their toilet replaced, and what the plumber found, proved that diamonds are forever.

On Christmas morning, Shaina Day couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Is that my ring?” Shaina said.

It was the engagement ring she lost more than 21 years ago.

“I’d taken my ring off. It was sitting on the counter, so when I sopped up the water, I guess I didn’t pay attention very well, snagged my ring in the process and tossed it in the toilet and flushed it,” Shaina said.

At the time, she and her now-husband of 20 year, had just gotten engaged months earlier and were living at his parents house in Lakeland.

“I climbed down into the septic tank with a hose that I had to suck up everything that was down there, and I pumped it through a hose over a screen, a window screen, into a 55 gallon drum,” she said.

All that effort, and no ring to show for it.

Until last week, when Nick’s parents replaced their toilet.

“The plumber unhooked it from the ground and then just dumped it over in the tub to get the excess water out, so when he took it out it didn’t drip through the house, and when he did, the ring came out,” Nick said.

After all these years it had been sitting in a toilet pipe, and on Christmas morning, they wrapped it up in a miniature ceramic toilet and gifted it back to them

“That just is absolutely amazing that it’s just been sitting there because we had just thought it was gone,” Shaina said. “It was never coming back.”

The ring broken, but the diamond was still intact.

After a cleaning, it’s still shining just as bright as was when Nick proposed more than two decades ago, and now, it’s more meaningful than ever.

“To know that everyone cared enough about it and thought it was so cool that they didn’t tell us, it was an actual genuine surprise,” Nick said. “It was. It brought tears to both our eyes.”

The couple said that they may incorporate the diamond into a new piece of jewelry or pass it on for a future generation to enjoy.

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