“It’s like winning the lottery and everything else,” Ramey, 50, said Friday.
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On Wednesday, Ramey said she had been cleaning the bathroom of her Dalewood Place home when her wedding rings slipped off her finger and into her toilet. She said she flushed the toilet before realizing the rings were no longer on her finger.
She panicked.
“I thought the worst,” she said. “I was a wreck.”
These were just any rings, she insisted. Lost was a heirloom ring set that has been appraised at “close to” $30,000, she said.
“Some people would have seen this as just a pair of rings, but to me, this was my life story,” Ramey said. “They mean that much to me.”
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Ramey gathered family members in a vain search for the rings on the slim hope that they had not vanished down a drain and had been misplaced elsewhere. But she said it quickly became all too clear that this was a plumbing emergency.
She called her usual plumbing company. There, she said, staff told her: “They’re gone.”
Desperate, she searched out You Tube tutorials on recovering rings lost in these kinds of situations. There, Ramey said, she saw a testimonial on how Mr. Rooter Plumbing had recovered another lady’s ring.
When Ramey called, Mr. Rooter Plumbing agreed to take her job, which gave her some measure of hope.
“It was like he knew how much these rings meant to me,” she said.
“Everybody kind of gives us the work,” said Aaron Paul, manager of Mr. Rooter. “I’ll take it.”
To hold fast to the possibility of recovery, her household had to refrain from further flushing in order to keep from pushing the rings further from the house and into the main county septic system.
There, the rings might not have been recoverable.
“If the rings had gotten out into the road, I would have given it my all with cameras or something — but probably not,” Paul said.
“I had to go 24 hours with no running water, nothing, just terrified that these rings were gone,” Ramey said.
On Thursday, the business sent out a three-man crew with cameras and recovery tools. After obtaining county permission, digging in the yard commenced.
Said Ramey, “I didn’t care if they dug that whole yard up, I didn’t care. I’m serious.”
The rings were “so close” to the main county water system, she said. “They had gone far.”
But they were reachable. “They got ‘em,” Ramey said.
In all, it was a nearly six-hour job Thursday, from 9 a.m. until nearly 3 p.m.
“She was ecstatic and lost it,” Paul said. “She just kind of lost it and praised the Lord. It’s warm and welcoming when we’re able to help someone like that.”
For now, Ramey says she intends to get the rings re-sized and re-appraised.
“Every time I look at my rings, I can reflect on something,” Ramey said. “Like, they mean that much to me.”
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