Last Tuesday night, 29-year-old Jenna Evans had a vivid dream that cast her and her fiancé in some kind of action-adventure scenario. The two of them were on a high-speed train, and in order to protect her ring from their sketchy adversaries, she slid her engagement ring off her finger, grabbed a glass of water, and swallowed it.
She woke up a few hours later, looked at the bare spot where 2.4 carats used to be, and if you know where this is going, then perhaps you and Evans have visited the same gastroenterologist. “Welp. I have really outdone myself this time. I swallowed my engagement ring. In my sleep,” she posted on Facebook, along with an X-ray of the ring’s then-current location. “Waiting to get sedated and get this sucker extracted.”
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In a second Facebook post—one that has been shared more than 60,000 times—Evans said that she both laughed and panicked when she realized what she had done, and then she went to the nearest urgent care center to see how she could undo it. “The doctor ordered an Xray and seemed pretty shocked when she walked back in with a second doctor and showed me that sure enough, my ring was right there in my stomach,” she wrote. “They called a gastroenterologist and decided it would be best NOT to let nature take its course. Before I left, she recommended seeing a sleep specialist as well.”
Evans and her fiancé, Bobby Howell, went to the GI doc (no, not by train), where she was sedated, an upper endoscopy was performed, and her ring was surgically removed. “I was really happy because I don’t know if I can look at it and appreciate it in the same way, if I had to search for it,” she told 10News.
In an interview with NBC San Diego, Evans said that she had a history of sleepwalking, and had even done laundry in her sleep, but this was the first time she’d eaten anything, including food or jewelry. According to the Cleveland Clinic, anywhere between 1% and 3% of the adult population is affected by Sleep-Related Eating Disorder (SRED), which is a nine-syllable way of saying they eat during their sleep, and can even walk into their kitchens and prepare meals without having any recollection of doing so the next morning.
“People with SRED may consume different foods than they would typically eat during the daytime, and may even eat inedible substances or strange combinations of foods,” the Clinic explains. (Although they’re both classified as sleep disorders, SRED is different than Nocturnal Eating Syndrome; in that scenario, the afflicted individual knows that he or she is eating during the night, and they may be unable to sleep until they’ve eaten something.)
Evans and Howell plan to get married in Texas next May. For the next 10-ish months, she just maaay want to consider a ring holder—possibly in another room.
