He was lying in bed and I was sitting in a chair opposite him and we started mulling over all the places it could have gone. Neither of us remembered him taking it off and I was with him most of the time. The only times I left was when I went home to get his phone and that first night but Kim and Karen stayed overnight with him. Did he have to take it off when he went for his CT scan? He didn't remember taking it off. We asked the nurses if he would have had to take it off and they said no. Even though it slid easily around on his finger it wasn't so loose that it could just slip off. What a mystery. The nurse sent someone up from security so that we could report it missing and to see if it wound up in lost and found or at least make them aware that if it did they should notify us.
Maybe he left it home before we left for Emergency that first morning. I went home at some point and looked for it. I checked on the table next to his chair downstairs and on his dressser and in a bunch of drawers but nothing.
We were home and sort of stopped thinking too much about it. It seemed like it was just gone, but how and when? Since we were going on a cruise to the Caribbean and stopping at St Thomas I thought we could look for a new ring there.
Then, a few days ago I started to delete my 2019 pictures from iCloud so that I could start saving my 2020 pictures. In the process I was looking at pictures from when Larry was in the hospital and there were pictures taken at 5:00 am the morning we went to Emergency and he didn't have his ring on. It was gone before he went for any tests.
That night I had an epiphany. I pictured him handing me his ring sometime, somewhere and then I remembered. We were sitting in the waiting room after he got checked in but before we went into the Emergency area, The woman behind the desk asked him if he had any valuables he wanted to leave with me. I don't know why, I was going to go in with him, but I didn't think about that at the time. I remember that he took off his ring, gave it to me and I said, "I'm putting it 'here1' and then I'm putting it 'here2', so one of us should remember." But I couldn't remember where 'here1' or 'here2' was. I wanted to wake Larry up and tell him what I remembered but I figured it could wait until morning. Instead I got out of bed and went through all my purses and bags looking for the ring. I knew what I had taken with me that morning and there wasn't a ring in anything. In the morning when I told Larry, he also remembered handing me the ring. It took 3 weeks to remember that. Now that I knew the missing ring was my fault I couldn't stop thinking about it. It inspired me to clean out the office in case it was somewhere in there but no luck. The office does look good though.
Yesterday we went to Britta and Steve's for a Danish Smorgasbord with Lee and Jim Farrell. I told them the missing ring story and Lee was convinced I would find it.
This morning before I had to leave for piano I thought I would take out some of my summer clothes in preparation for our trip. I pulled the box out from under Larry's side of the bed where I store some of my off season clothes.
I took the top off and took out some tops and shorts and put them on the bed. Then I replaced the cover on the box, pushed it back under the bed and there on the rug right in front of my eyes was the ring.
How it got there is as much of a mystery as where it went after I took it from Larry in the hospital. I screamed out my find to Larry and we were both so excited. Maybe someday it will come back to me as to what I did with it but I'm not going to dwell on it.
I took a picture of the ring so we know what it looks like, just in case . . .
All's well that ends well.
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