Woman Swallows $5,000 Diamond: Has Colonoscopy to Recover Precious Rock (VIDEO)
A woman has swallowed a $5,000 diamond at a charity event in Tampa, Florida over the weekend in an incident that left organizers at the event stunned.
According to reports, a local jeweler donated the expensive diamond to the Tampa Women's Club as a special feature for its charity event.
Organizers thought it would be fun to place the diamond in one lucky person's champagne glass. So as servers prepared the celebratory drinks, a fake diamond was placed in each flute, but in just one of 400 glasses, the real precious rock was put in. Whoever received the right glass would be the lucky winner who would be able to take the diamond home with them.
The charity organizers were listening intently for someone's scream and celebrations at getting the diamond, however, everyone remained silent and just got on with drinking their champagne. They checked everyone's flutes one by one without luck.
A partner at Continental Wholesale Diamond, Andrew Meyer, told ABC: "We were going table to table. There were 400 flutes so were going quickly table to table and in the end there was no diamond."
However, an elderly woman then owned up saying that she had been too embarrassed to own up sooner, but that she had accidentally swallowed the diamond with her first swig of champagne.
Luckily for the organizers, the elderly woman, Marian, had already scheduled herself in for a colonoscopy the following day. So before she had the procedure she told the doctors that they should keep their eyes out for an unusual object inside her rectum.
Doctors later did indeed find the diamond and returned it to Marian.
Marian then went back to the organizers to have the diamond verified as the authentic one.
Joy Pierson, one of Continental Wholesale Diamond's partners, said: "She came with it in a bio-hazard bag and it wasn't even cleaned."
However, after it was thoroughly cleaned and examined the organizers verified that the elderly lady was indeed the winner and had the real $5,000 diamond.
Here is a video news report into the extraordinary incident: