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‘I Felt It in My Gut': Sleep Eating Lands One Woman in Urgent Care

She didn’t remember removing her ring, but she said she remembered swallowing it with a big gulp of water like a vitamin

When San Diego resident Jenna Evans couldn’t find her engagement ring one morning, she looked inside herself to solve the mystery.

Evans, 29, woke up to find her engagement ring missing from her finger and her bedroom altogether. She said she checks for her ring all the time ever since her fiancé proposed in April.

“So, in case you missed it, I swallowed my engagement ring in my sleep on Tuesday night,” Evans wrote on Facebook.

She claims her fiancé told her to remove it in a dream. 

"We were on a cargo train at night and it was a mission impossible kind of situation. There were bad guys and he said, 'You have to swallow your ring.'"

She didn’t remember removing her 2.4-carat diamond ring, but she said she remembered swallowing it with a big gulp of water like a vitamin.

“I have a lot of strange dreams, so I also thought that it was probably a dream. I just went back to sleep,” Evans told NBC 7 San Diego.

“It took a while to recover from the laughing to figure out what we should do,” Evans added.

She went to urgent care, where doctors were shocked to find a diamond ring traveling through her body in an X-ray.

Swallowed Ring Xray
Jenna Evans

Doctors decided against letting “nature take its course” and referred Evans to a gastroenterologist, who promptly scheduled her for an upper endoscopy, the insertion of a small camera and device down someone's throat.

“I could definitely feel it in my guts, it was starting to really hurt and make us nervous,” Evans said.

They found her ring sitting in her intestines just beyond her stomach.

The incident was not completely unexpected, Evans said. She has a history of sleepwalking and even doing laundry in her sleep. But she said she’s never eaten in her sleep, let alone swallowed a non-food object.

With the ring back on her finger, Evans and her fiancé Bob Howell plan on getting married in May of next year.

Evans is doing well now — in fact, she’s been laughing about it ever since. She said she plans on scheduling an appointment with a sleep specialist soon.

“I don’t have any fears that I will swallow it again. I hopefully will only achieve such greatness once,” she said. 

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