I had a massage on Saturday with my Dad's girlfriend, Mary, and my Aunt Caroline. Prior to the massage, I removed my wedding and engagement rings. My hands were a little swollen from being pregnant and flying and both rings gave me a hard time when I tried to take them off. I thought that having them on during the massage might make it worse, so I left them at home.
Several hours later, my hands looked a little bit better, so I put my rings back on. Once again, it was a little difficult to get them on, but I figured that I better put them back on or I'd risk losing them. I've had this paranoid fear of misplacing them for the past five years.
Fast forward to 3:00 on Sunday morning. I wake up, and my hand looks like this:
My finger was purple and swollen and losing sensation. Commence complete freak out.
Given that it was the middle of the night, I didn't want to wake anyone else up. I tried soaking my hand in ice water, raising it above the level of my heart, and applying an ice pack to reduce the swelling, but after an hour, my finger looked just as bad. I attempted using Crisco, Dawn, hand soap, and lotion to see if I could slide off the rings. Not only was it not working ,but my knuckle was getting even bigger from the pushing. At 4:30 a.m., now nearing panic levels, I started to Google local emergency rooms. I was pretty sure that my rings were going to have to be cut off.
I fell asleep for a couple of hours and when I woke, the redness had improved, but the swelling had worsened. By then, my Dad and his girlfriend were up, so I trudged out of the guest room and immediately showed them my hand. They gave me a fresh ice pack and seemed optimistic that we could remove the rings with some additional icing and Vaseline. My Dad made me sit with my hand in the coldest ice water bath I've ever experienced - so cold I started crying. J was also up by now and I made a weak joke about how this was all going to prepare me for labor. Ha ha.
To make a long story short: ice, elevation, Vaseline - none of it worked. Dad made a valiant attempt for over an hour to push off my rings, but they were not budging and my hand was still swelling. He finally came to the same conclusion I'd made early that morning: my rings were going to have to be cut off.
Only I didn't go to the emergency room to have it done.
If you guessed that my Dad used a woodworking drill bit to hack off my engagement ring, ding ding! You win $100.00.
As soon as I got the engagement ring off, the swelling started to subside. I managed to get my wedding ring off several hours later.
The moral of the story? Never shove a ring on your finger. And make sure you have a drill bit in case of emergency.
