It was about 4 a.m. Sunday, as Samantha "Sam" LaRochelle lay in a hospital bed, when she noticed her beloved and irreplaceable necklace wasn't on her.

She figured her wife, Audrey LaRochelle, had it and closed her eyes.

Panic set in when she was discharged a couple of hours later.

No one had the necklace.

"This thing means more to me than the world," said Sam LaRochelle, of Lopatcong Township.

On Wednesday, she was reunited with the prized dual-pendant, custom-chain possession -- thanks to persistence and no small measure of sympathy on the part of a Phillipsburg police officer and staff at St. Luke's Hospital in Phillipsburg, its trash hauler and Covanta Energy Corp.

"They found it and I almost wanted to drop to my knees crying," she said.

It was an employee named Steve Acierno at the Covanta trash-to-energy plant in Oxford Township who finally pulled the necklace from some 15 tons worth of trash bags searched Wednesday morning.

"We all picked through it by hand," said Herman Love, Covanta facility manager. "We spent about two hours searching through it to find what she had lost.

"She was super-excited to have it back. Just a great start to our day. We were all really happy for her."

Sam LaRochelle had been taken unconscious to St. Luke's on Saturday night due to a medical condition. She never takes the necklace off, but hospital staff did -- along with a black T-shirt they cut off her.

One of the pendants is an impression, in 14-karat gold, of LaRochelle's mother's thumbprint. Shirley Ann Teeter died in 2011. The other is an image of Jesus Christ that Teeter had bought for LaRochelle's grandfather, Charles S. Teeter. Upon his death in 1983, the icon was returned to his daughter, who passed it along to LaRochelle. The chain was made just for her by Audrey, Sam's partner of 23 years.

The old chain Sam wore used to snag her hair.

"It's been longer than we've been together that it's been on my neck," Sam said of the pendants together.

At St. Luke's, the necklace went into a cup, a lid went onto the cup and the cup with the T-shirt ended up in the trash.

That should have never happened, St. Luke's University Health Network said in a statement:

"St. Luke's is pleased that the patient retrieved her necklace with the assistance of the hospital's staff and others. We have processes in place to ensure the safekeeping of our patients' belongings. In this case, we regret that during the patient's visit we inadvertently misplaced her necklace. We are reviewing our processes and will learn from this experience to ensure something like this does not happen again."

No one might have ever known the necklace had been trashed were it not for Phillipsburg police officer Steven Fielding.

On Monday, Fielding watched St. Luke's surveillance footage from the nine hours Sam was hospitalized, and he noticed items taken from her room and thrown into a trash can by a central desk.

That was enough for Sam.

On Monday night, she went to the hospital and took down the name of the trash hauler: Harmony Township-based Sanico Inc. An employee there put Sam in touch with Marsha James, in charge of waste disposal at St. Luke's, and learned the St. Luke's trash winds up at Covanta.

On Wednesday morning, Sam got a call the compactor was headed out for the incinerator and she followed behind the truck in her car.

Audrey at first insisted Sam was crazy to try to find the necklace.

"You're really going to dig through bags and bags of the garbage?" she asked.

Covanta wouldn't allow Sam to do it herself, but the employees were up for it, Love said.

"That's something that we do," he said. "We wouldn't want to expose anybody else to it."

Some days are better than others. Found this ladies lost jewelry this morning after searching for two hours. Thanks Steve Acierno for finding it. Best employees around. Posted by Covanta Energy Plant at Warren County N.J. on Wednesday, June 21, 2017

The hospital waste is nonhazardous and complies with the limits on what Covanta can burn, Love said.

But that doesn't mean it was easy. Wielding pitchforks and other tools, the searchers were toward the end of the bags when Acierno found Sam's black, cut-up T-shirt and the cup, the necklace peeking out through a dent beneath the lid.

Covanta is now three-for-three in about the last six months on finding belongings tossed in the trash and brought in for disposal.

"That's where I think the karma sets in and it's always at the very end," Love said. "You never find it at the very beginning. You always find it when you're ready to give up."

The LaRochelles on Thursday brought lunch and cake to the Covanta crew to thank them for their trouble.

"All of these people, it's just so amazing," Audrey said. "They don't know us."

"As a gesture, it's hardly enough," said Sam. "It's something I could never replace and they took the time, the effort."

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.