The "Ring" of Truth
July 2015
Jimmy Fallon, well known host of The Tonight Show, recently revealed why he has been wearing a sizable bandage and brace on his left hand during the show after coming back from a two week break this summer
"I can't tell you how excited I am to be back and seeing you guys here. What a crazy break we had, a two-week break. So basically what happened is I tripped and fell on a braided rug that my wife loved, and I can't wait to burn it to the ground. I tripped and fell and I caught my fall. So I'm getting up and my finger's sideways. So I go, 'Oh, my God! Did I just break my finger? This is the lamest thing in the whole world.' It completely looks fake, like in a cheap horror movie where you see a broken finger. It looks like that! That's what it looks like. So I wrap my hand in a towel and I get in a cab and go to the emergency room. I go, 'I broke my finger! I think I broke my finger!' And they go, 'Oh, you didn't break your finger.'"
I was something far worse as he explained.
"It's a thing called ring avulsion. A-V-U-L-S-I-O-N. If you Google it, it's graphic images. Don't Google it. But ring avulsion, it's a real thing...My ring got caught on a countertop when I was going down and stuck there and pulled my finger out," he explained. "Trust me, I'm like, 'Wait, what?' I didn't even look at the thing. So I go, 'Can you fix it?' And they go, 'Oh, no. No. We've got to send you somewhere else.'"
"Really, this is like microsurgery. This is like a thing. I was at Beth Israel. I had to go over to Bellevue Hospital. This amazing doctor, Dr. David Chiu, comes in. He has a bowtie and cowboy boots. 'That's my doctor! That's my guy!' I knew it when he walked in. I go, 'That's the guy who's going to save my finger.'"
Fallon explained that the "odds aren't great with these things...Usually they just cut your finger off. So, I was going to lose my finger. And I was like, 'Wow.' So this guy did surgery for like six hours—microsurgery—so it's like under a microscope. He had to take a vein out of my foot. It's a crazy story! I didn't know this was happening because I was knocked out at this point. So he took a vein out of my foot and put it in there. Veins only work one way...so you have to remember which way and reverse it, and if you're putting it together and you do one missed stitch or something like that, the vein closes up and it's useless. You screwed up and it's not going to happen. And he did it. He saved my finger."
Incidents like this can happen anywhere. The likelihood that you would trip and catch your ring on the countertop is rare. However wearing rings while working around moving equipment with your hands is another story. Each week incidents such as what happened to Fallon occur in workplaces around the world. Don't tempt fate . . . don't wear jewelry while working around moving equipment.