THORNTON, CO (KMGH/CNN) - Did you ever forget about something really important?
One Colorado woman did and she paid a high price.
Renee Reese has lost $35,000 which she stored in a refrigerator.
The money went missing when Costco replaced the appliance. Some delivery people exchanged a defective refrigerator-freezer combo for a new one.
"I couldn't believe it wasn't there," said Reese who lost her life savings. "My assumption is that I had about $35,000 in there."
Since the beginning of June, Reese, her family and her friends have been in a battle with Costco to track down the cash.
"The financial strain has devastated me and because I'm so sick, I don't have any way to recover it," Reese said.
She has an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis, which is increasingly destroying her mobility.
That's why she needed the new refrigerator.
"You're in here, you're pulling out a large item without a disability, the doors need to stay open," she said.
That's also why she used her freezer as a temporary bank for her small business and savings.
She was trying to limit the number of trips she needed to take to the real bank.
"It was a safe place to put it in case there was a fire," Reese said.
Yet, as bad luck would have it, the large denomination bills in a bag, wrapped in white paper towels, blended with the inside of the freezer door.
In a hurry to clean out the old fridge, Reese and her family simply didn't see it.
"I thought my daughter had grabbed it, she thought I had grabbed it, then when I went to look for it to put it back, it wasn't there," she said.
Reese has since filed a police report after tearing apart her house detailing what happened.
She also says Costco opened a claim for her and said they found the old fridge, but there was no money inside.
But that was it.
Some are frustrated Costco has not done more - has not more aggressively questioned its employees and the four or five subcontractors involved in delivering Reese’s fridge.
"Who's checking these people? What if they're rapists or pedophiles? Or, I mean, nobody knows anything and you can't talk to them, at least through the experience I've had," Reese said.
In the meantime, Reese wants a resolution and wants the armchair critics out there to understand this is not as crazy as it may sound.
"There's a thousand reasons why I couldn't get to the bank. I wasn't physically able to," she said. "I was trying to live whatever of it I had left."
Costco’s subcontractor said they haven't seen the money either.
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