Woman's long lost diamond ring turns up in an office printer of all places...

An Indiana woman has been reunited with a diamond she lost nearly five years ago - and it had been lodged in her office printer the entire time.

Christi Hansen panicked when the half-carat marquis diamond from her beloved engagement ring disappeared one day while she was working at Evansville business Brake Supply in 2008.

'I looked down and noticed that my diamond was gone out of the top of it,' said Hansen, who married the love of her life 13 years earlier in February 1995.

She searched frantically for the jewel, which had been sitting on top of the ring with channel-set baguettes on all four sides, and her colleagues joined in but to no avail.

'We basically tore my whole desk apart, on our hands and knees going through the floor. I even went through all the bathrooms,' Hansen told NBC News.

She said she even hunted through bags of trash for her treasured possession.

'I loaded my whole car up with full trash bags and then got home and laid a tarp out in my garage and literally with rubber gloves went through every piece of trash, thinking I was going to find it in there.'

When it was clear the diamond was nowhere to be found, Hansen's forgiving husband bought her a replacement engagement ring.

But this week - four and a half years after the diamond disappeared, Wayne Sutton, a technician with Alpha Laser, pulled it from the rough - or the office printer to be precise.

'I was just looking and it was like right in here,' Sutton told NBC News. 'I thought it was a piece of dust or something, piece of paper, but I was blowing it around and trying to get it out and it wouldn't move.

I just grabbed it and I was looking at it and was like, "this looks like a diamond,"' he said.

And it was Hansen's diamond, covered in toner.

'I immediately told somebody I found a diamond I think. I need to find out who this belongs to. They did a little searching and I heard some screaming. I think I found the owner,' he told the TV station.

Hansen couldn't believe her eyes.

'I don't know what to think, what to feel. He is my hero. He is my hero. He is,' she said.

Hansen is going to keep wearing the replacement ring, make the recovered diamond into a necklace, and put a new stone in the old setting so she has three pieces from her original wedding set to give her three sons for their own big days.