Twenty-one years ago, a Lakeland, Florida couple misplaced their diamond engagement ring. Shaina Day thought her beautiful ring was lost forever until she was reunited with her long-lost ring after her mother-in-law Renee had her toilet replaced. During the replacement process, the plumber found the diamond engagement ring stuck inside the porcelain bowl. The ring had been given to Shaina by her husband, Nick Day, who proposed marriage with the ring over two decades ago.
Unfortunately, for the Florida love birds, the engagement ring went missing right before the couple was to be wed. Shaina had the ring one moment, and the next, it was simply not in her possession.
“She came to me one day and said, ‘I think I lost my ring,’” Nick told WFLA-TV. “She said, ‘It was on the counter. Now it’s gone, and I think I may have flushed it down the toilet on accident.’”
The couple did everything they could to look for the missing diamond engagement ring. They even looked through the home’s septic system with high hopes that the process would reunite them with the missing ring. Unfortunately, they pumped and pumped and were not able to extract the ring from the septic system in Shaina’s mother-in-law’s house.
“I climbed down into the septic tank so we could pump it, every bit of it, through a strainer to try to find it,” Shaina recalled. “No luck.”
The couple replaced the engagement ring but always wondered what had happened to the original one that Nick Day had used to propose marriage. The answer came to them twenty-one years later when Nick’s mother had her toilet replaced, and the plumber found the ring in the toilet.
Renee, Shiana’s mother-in-law, called the happy bride as soon as the plumber found the missing ring.
“He said, ‘Do you think it’s Shaina’s ring?’” Renee told WFLA-TV. “I looked at it again, and I went, ‘Oh my God, yes!’”
Renee and her husband gave the engagement ring a thorough cleaning and then gift-wrapped it to present to the couple on Christmas night. Nick said that he and Shaina both “knew exactly what it was” when they opened the Christmas gift.
When she was reunited with her long-lost ring, Shaina became overwhelmed with emotion.
“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,” Shaina said.
The couple now has a few options for the found engagement ring. They might want to pass it down through the generations since the piece of jewelry has such an amazing backstory. However, they are also contemplating incorporating the ring into another piece of jewelry to give it a new life.
After being reunited with the missing ring after more than twenty years, Nick learned a valuable lesson when it comes to lost possessions.
“Check your toilets when you lose things,” Nick joked.