A long time ago, when I was first starting out, I worked at a hospital that had only one MRI-compatible ventilator.
For my non-medical readers, a ventilator is the "breathing machine" that keeps you alive when your body needs a break, during surgery, etc. Once you're better we take you off it. It's a very complicated gadget, with a fair amount of ferrous metal.
As a result, a standard ventilator can't go in an MRI. Since patients on one sometimes need an MRI (usually once a pesky neurologist gets involved) there are MRI-safe ventilators. These are stripped down machines, mostly plastic and non-ferrous metal. They're less durable than a regular ventilator and don't have all the features, but they're fine for an hour or so that a patient needs it while in the MRI machine.
Anyway, back at Small Hospital, one day the MRI-safe ventilator was missing. This was a real problem, because now we couldn't do MRI's on ICU patients who needed them. We were able to temporarily get an extra from a larger hospital across town, but still needed ours back. They ain't cheap.
Security searched, literally, every square inch of Small Hospital. The kitchens, the bathrooms, every patient room, the storage areas... it wasn't there. Small Hospital didn't have the array of video monitoring they do now, so looking for someone leaving with it wasn't possible.
One early morning during rounds I was in ICU, chatting about it with some of the nurses when one of them said, half-joking, "maybe it's on Ebay."
Since I was on the computer looking up labs, I switched over to Ebay... and there it was. A used MRI-compatible ventilator, same model, which had been up for sale since one day after it had gone missing. The seller's name was an easily-recognizable variant on the name of a guy who worked as a hospital radiology transporter.
The ventilator was back a few day later.
The transporter spent some time as a guest of the state, in spite of his clever defense that he'd seen it standing next to a dumpster at his apartment complex several miles from the hospital and had just kept it as a decoration because he didn't know what it was but it looked cool.
The machine was at the hospital for several more years before it was replaced by a newer model. For the rest of its service the nurses kept a sign on it that said "NOT FOR DECORATION."
