You know those heart warming stories you sometimes read about someone losing something very valuable and then some incredibly honest person returns it?

Well, this isn't one of those stories.

This is a story about a 27-year-old Otego woman I'm going to refer to as Sally even though that is not her name. She's embarrassed enough already.

Sally, like so many of us, lives paycheck-to-paycheck, and like so many of us ... did a dumb thing.

Sally lost $1,300 she couldn't afford to lose.

After several years in one job, Sally, who lives with her parents, started working for a local bank about a month ago. She was such a reliable employee at her old place of employment that she earned extra money for time-off owed to her she had never taken.

In addition, in one two-week period while in transition from one job to the other, Sally worked 80 hours at the bank and 35 hours at her old job.

That's how she earned the $1,300.

Most of the money, she told me as her eyes teared up, was to go to family members who had helped her in the past and were in need of it now. The rest was to pay some of Sally's regular bills.

That's why a week ago Thursday, Sally was carrying around all that cash in a bank envelope instead of just depositing the dough in her bank account.

The young woman stopped off on her way home to buy cigarettes and lottery tickets at the Smoker Friendly store in Oneonta. Soon after she got back into her car, she noticed to her horror that the money was gone.

She looked everywhere, but the envelope wasn't there.

Not in her purse, not in her car.

Nowhere.

She frantically returned to the store, but the clerk said no one had seen it. A store camera hadn't been operating at the time Sally had been there, the clerk said.

Sally reported her loss to the police, who were sympathetic. But realistically, how do you track down cash if someone doesn't return it?

You can't, and Sally knows it.

She also knows how badly she screwed up. Whether someone took the envelope from her purse or whether she absent-mindedly left it on the store counter or dropped it when she got out of the car, Sally knows it was her responsibility to keep the money safe.

And she's sick about it.

Literally.

Sally suffers from an uncommon disorder called Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome.

When it hits her, she just keeps vomiting and can't stop. It's an awful thing that can afflict a person five or 10 times an hour and can last for days.

No one really knows what causes it. but sometimes excitement, stress, anxiety or fear can trigger episodes.

Last weekend, after tearful, self-blaming days and nights, Sally had another awful vomiting attack.

There's a drug that helps, but it costs about $1,000. Sally's still covered under her old job prescription benefits, but there will be a gap of about a month before her new work coverage kicks in.

She hopes she will have enough medicine to tide her over. If not, it will mean another expensive and wrenching visit to a hospital emergency room.

We can say that Sally shouldn't be smoking given her condition, and she would readily agree, although she said the stress from losing all that money has made it impossible to even think about stopping any time soon.

We can say that Sally shouldn't have been carrying around that much cash in the first place and that she should have been much more careful, and we would be correct both times.

But show me anybody who is perfect or incapable of being in Sally's predicament. On Monday, the day I spoke to Sally at my office, I drove off from home without the eyeglasses I need to do my job and had to go back to get them.

Is that so different from what happened to Sally, except that my brain freeze didn't cost me $1,300?

I've only met her once, but Sally seems to be a nice, hard-working young woman. I couldn't help but feel sorry for what happened to her.

But I feel a lot more sorry that we live in a society where if someone is honest and returns something that doesn't belong to him, it's considered so remarkable that a newspaper will do a 'man-bites-dog' story about it.

Sally will survive what happened to her. Eventually, she'll recover financially. But I'm not certain she will ever look upon the world in quite the same way after someone took something of hers with no concern other than greed.

'I know this is my fault,' she told me. 'But I wish a lot more people were honest. I wish people would think about how they would feel if this happened to them. It kind of scares me to think that you can't even trust someone.'

It kind of scares me, too.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.