Yes. and that sick feeling in your stomach. Then I thought of the insurance. I raced home and dug out the policy. But lost stone out of ring is excepted out. So I was SOL.
I hit the back of my hand on the milker rather hard but did not realize for a couple of hours that the stone was gone. I went back, swept the barn, looked in the hay manger. Nothing. The owner had scheduled that area to be concreted in 3 days. I searched diligently, but the concrete truck came and somewhere under that slab is my big diamond.
I have a good friend who lost her stone while feeding the chickens. Many years later, after butchering some chickens, she was cleaning gizzards. There was the diamond working as a grinding stone in a chicken's gizzard.