Good News UK

An anesthesiologist who accidentally sent her diamond ring through the wash is rejoicing after her treasured piece of jewelry turned up at another hospital.

Dr. Radhika Ramasamy, a consultant anesthesiologist at the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K., put her diamond ring in her scrubs pocket in mid-December while she was doing an anesthetic procedure.

"I meant to put the ring back on afterward but ended up doing another procedure and forgot about it," Ramasamy told the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, which reported the story on Feb. 8.

She didn't realize until the next day that the ring was gone, the doctor said.

And by "then it was the weekend, so I didn’t report it to my facilities team 'til the Monday," she said, adding that she "never expected to get it back" as she thought it would be destroyed by the washing machines, the foundation reported.

As luck would have it, not only was the ring not destroyed during the laundering process — it was still safely tucked into the scrubs.

On Dec. 19, five days after Ramasamy tucked the ring into her pocket, anesthetics registrar Suraj Shah was putting on his own scrubs — and found something unexpected.

"As I put the scrubs on, something clattered to the floor and a colleague spotted the ring and alerted me," Shah told the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.

Initially, Shah thought perhaps the ring belonged to one of the nurses at his hospital — the Royal Free Hospital in London.

"I put the word out through the nurse in charge," he said. "I checked with the doctors as well, but [heard] nothing, so I contacted our facilities team."

The facilities team at Royal Free Hospital reached out to the laundry service it used for its scrubs.

It was then that it learned that Ramasamy reported her ring missing.

The Royal Free Hospital is nearly 100 miles away from the West Suffolk Hospital.

A reunion was quickly arranged, and Ramasamy got back her ring — a gift from her husband — safe and sound.