How to remove a ring from your finger without a firearm
[An astute reader brought the sad tale of Alfredo Malspini III to my attention, and lest any of you shoot off a finger to spite a ring, I thought I'd share some practical advice about ring-removal that I wrote up a few years back.]
There you are on a Saturday night, futzing with your wedding ring because your wife thinks your trichotillomania makes you look mangy: off your left ring finger, onto your right pinkie; off your right pinkie, onto your left pinkie; off your left pinkie, onto your right ring finger; off your right ring finger, off your right ring finger, OFF YOUR RIGHT RING FINGER, non et cetera. You pull and you twist; you pull while twisting and you twist while pulling all to no avail.
You look at your wife and you tell her, “I’ve misplaced my wedding band.” She will look at you, j’accuse burning in her eyes, until you hold up your right hand. She will then enter the kitchen and return with the ingredients required to perform Step One:
1. Apply cold water and a little soap. Gently work the soap under the ring and twist. If the ring still does not come off, massage the area of the finger below the knuckle to remove some of the fluid from the finger. Wait a few minutes, then repeat. Continue until the finger is good and chafed.
After fifteen minutes of repeated failure, your wife will walk back into the kitchen and return with the materials needed for Step Two:
2. Dry the chafed finger with hand towel, then apply the following in any order: water-based lubricants, oil-based lubricants, semi-solid fats, hydrogenated vegetable oils, as well as any lard, suet, ghee, tallow, or schmaltz you find lying around. As with the soap and water, work the slippery substance under the ring and twist and turn. Carefully slip a knife under the ring and try to slide it over the knuckle. If the ring-bearer cries in pain, ascertain whether its source is the ring jamming on the knuckle or the knife slicing into it.
This too will fail. Your wife will walk back into the kitchen yet again. Take this opportunity to try to wash your hilariously lubed finger. The water-based lubricants will dissolve quickly, but the oil-based lubricants, semi-solid fats, suet, schmaltz, &c. will take some time. Expect to find an oily residue scumming the top of the bucket used in Step Three:
3. Thrust your hand into the bucket of ice water which your wife has brought in from the kitchen. Leave it in there until the ring-bearer screams. When he does, shoot him a look of unconcealed embarrassment with a hint of disappointment, then allow him to “tough” it out for another three minutes. Once he passes out, remove his hand from the bucket and check to see that the desired amount of vasoconstriction has occurred, then repeat steps one and two.
You may notice that despite the intense cold and vigorous oily massaging, the area above the ring becomes increasingly swollen. This is normal. God designed the human body intelligently: when you unsuccessfully attempt to remove a ring from a swollen finger, your body responds by further swelling the finger. It may also turn begin to turn dark as more and more blood rushes to into the injured finger. Now would be a good time to consult the Internet. Find the Ask MetaFilter thread on “ring removal” and proceed to Step Four:
4. Do what the jewelers do: spray Windex on the finger and twist and pull. Do it again. Then again. The trick is to do this repeatedly so as to unlock the magical lubricative power of Windex. Then consider the probable reason jewelers use Windex: a jewelery shop consists almost entirely of display cases and Windex is sort of wet. At this point it will be past midnight. There is nothing more you can do. Put away the Windex and have the ring-bearer proceed to Step Five.
5. What you need to do now, ring-bearer, is drink enough vodka to catch a few hours of restless sleep in which you alternate between dreams in which you are Hans Brinker, son of a sluicer, and Hans Brinker, son of a space station captain. Alcohol is a diuretic, which should help with the swelling. Eat some pistachio nuts too, since salt absorbs water. There is also the chance that your finger may mysteriously unswell during the night.
6. You will awake to discover that your finger has not mysteriously unswollen during the night. That it has, in fact, swelled larger and darkened ominously. You should consult the Internet to learn that 1) fingers are naturally more swollen in the morning, 2) your body responds to a) alcohol-induced dehydration and b) the massive amount of sodium found in pistachio nuts by swelling. Now panic.
You may want to panic for a good long while. Remember, this is your right ring finger, and although you are ambidextrous, relearning how to do everything with your left hand will still be unthinkably inconvenient. Once you can breathe again, go online and learn what you need to do for Step Seven:
7. Elevate the hand above your heart for 15-20 minutes, then repeat steps one and two. When that fails to work, place a bucket of ice water on a chair, sit on the floor, then elevate it into the bucket and repeat steps three, one and two in that order. Pine for the mangy days of yore, then consult the internet again and proceed to Step Eight.
Step Eight will require string or dental floss, but have no fear, for it is endorsed by The Harvard School of Medicine.
Step Eight, Part the First:
“Pass an end of fine string or dental floss under the ring. With the other end, begin tightly wrapping the string around the finger. Ensure that the string is wrapped evenly and smoothly past the lower knuckle.”
Step Eight, Part the Second:
“With the end that was passed under the ring, begin unwrapping the string in the same direction. The ring should move over the string as the string is unwrapped.”
It should, but it will not. In fact, the act of wrapping the fluid-engorged finger will cause pain the likes of which reasonable people compare to birth-pangs. This will make your move to Step Eight, Part the Third particularly daring.
Step Eight, Part the Third:
Repeat variations of Step Eight, Parts the First and Second with packing tape, then Saran Wrap. When you regain consciousness, consider picking up the telephone and calling your local jeweler or emergency room. Exhausted interns and jewelers both keep one of these handy for just such an occasion.
Now pony up the $35 it costs for the jeweler to repair it, and resume plucking the hairs from your beard one at a time. If your wife complains, remind her of what happened the last time. If she insists on reminding you about your mother’s favorite story—about the time you got your head stuck in a toilet seat and the rescue squad had to be called in, and since your father drove an ambulance with that very squad, all the paramedics knew you and teased you as they used the jaws of life to extricate your head,[*] and did your mother mention she has a picture of you bawling, the toilet seat around your head, which she took while she waited for the paramedics to arrive, because she does and it is around here somewhere—if she insists on reminding you of that, turn up the television and pretend you can’t hear her, because you can’t win this one.
Hopefully the thread here won’t fill up with anguished comments — literally, as in, it pained them to type — informing me that none of my suggestions actually worked (save the last).
I never wear rings. Problems averted!
BTW, the last link in the quoted text gives out with a 404.
Jaws of life, also too.
Links all fixed/updated. Wow, has the Internet degraded in seven years or what? (At least the links to my place still work.)
after reading your list of suggested methods of stubborn ring removal, i’m inclined to believe the “shoot the finger off” method to be the most likely to succeed. the moral of the story: don’t get a ring stuck on your finger!
Yeah, I found as a kid that if you force a ring onto a finger, it only comes off at the ER where the nurse will come at you with what looks like a patented kid finger snipper.
That was the thing: I didn’t force the ring on, it just suddenly stuck and stayed stuck.
That’s why I bought a Tungsten Carbide ring. Now they’ll never be able to get it off… (except with a specialized diamond tipped drill)
Wouldn’t you do better to have a tungsten carbide finger, and a malleable ring?
Thats for the 2nd marriage
Why would you put your hand in ice water? Cold causes the body to push warm fluids to the extremities and causes gold to contract.
That being said, I lost my wedding ring for 3 days after I took it off to play with some Play-Doh.
I was being sarcastic when I wrote “God designed the human body intelligently.” It works at cross-purposes, or singlemindedly if its intent is to cause great pain.
I’ve lost some weight in the last couple of years. If I go outside on a warm day, the ring is not a problem. If I go outside on a cold day, like today, the only reason I haven’t lost the ring is that it stays in my glove when it falls of my finger.
Uhm, since cold water causes metal to contract, why wouldn’t you use warm or hot water, and soap?
Obviously, I’ve never been married.
And I never ever have worn a ring – at least not since I was a Senior in HS, and I left my newly received school ring in my locked locker for football practice, when someone pried the top open, to steal it.
I never had a ring on since then – not even to play a married man in a play.
I haven’t even worn an ear-ring since the early 80′s, when every guy seemed to get one.
The swelling in the skin caused by the blood backing up above the ring comes down faster than the ring contracts.
Technically speaking, coefficient of thermal expansion correlates directly with the strength of a material, so flesh will expand faster than metal when heated and contract faster than metal when cooled (rule of thumb: a material expands by 6% before melting). So cooling is the way to go, but you’d probably freeze your entire arm before thermal expansion proved effective.
Of course, flesh is water, and water expands when it freezes, so…
Further proof that God doesn’t want anyone to marry, gay, straight, or otherwise.
Or He doesn’t want anyone to ever escape. It’s like a bear trap: gnawing your entrapped member off is always a n option.
Also, correction, CTE varies inversely with strength, not directly.
I was once told by my paramour to wait until the Nazgul bit my finger off.
Why, yes, we were fighting getting my divorce. Why do you ask?
The Nazgul are wraiths–I don’t think they can bite, and I’m not sure they have teeth. What you need is a Gollum.
To remove your “precious.” The irony!
It’s like a wrai-ai-aith on your wedding ring.
Ahem
The ring cutter only works if your wedding band isn’t tungsten carbide. If it is, they have to shatter it. Don’t know if that requires a trip to the ER or the jeweler’s.
Vise grips. They work for EVERYTHING.
Put one on your finger and one on your ring. Then you pull in one direction and have a “friend” pull in the other.
That sounds unbelievably painful.
“Unbelievably painful” sounds like the logical next step. I suppose you could go with one or two more believably painful steps, if you like to drag things out. Of course, if you’re into pulling on fingers with vice grips, you might be intrinsically interested in dragging things out.
At this point, I believe I’d lobby for surgical removal of the finger as a preferable, and less painful, option, leading to essentially the same result set.
This is just advice for future random Googlers who find their way here, isn’t it?
I used to work in a machine shop, and I absolutely LOVED vise-grips. Whenever you didn’t know what the hell you were doing, you’d reach for one. I even made up an advertising slogan:
“You can break anything with a VISE-GRIP!”
When you’ve broken the head off that screw you tried to remove with the BIG vise-grip, THAT, my friend, is when you reach for the needle-nose vise-grip.
I remember the time we couldn’t get a bolt to move, so we clamped on the vice grip, put a foot-long piece of pipe over the handle, and smacked the thing with a 32-ounce hammer. That turned out well …
(No, the name of the shop was not “3 Stooges Machine Services”)
I once did something similar, only I attached vise-grips to the vise-grip attached to the pipe for leverage…. worked, too!
You can fix anything with duct tape!
I believe with vise-grips and duct tape you are prepared for essentially anything.
You still need WD-40. I’m baffled why that was not on SEK’s list.
It’s one of those oil-based lubricants that I mentioned in the “&c.”
K-Y works better.
What? I’ve had practice…
Cats. Get a couple of cats. Take your ring off each night. Wait.
Eventually the cats will smack the ring into that mysterious blackhole where cats smack things.
I found that blackhole a few months back, chasing after my very well-behaved Maine Coon, who was running off with a five dollar bill.* I followed him into the bedroom, at which point he disappeared under the bed. Just vanished. Finally I realized that he’d chewed a hole through the box spring and, once I took off the mattress and inspected the contents, I not only found about three years worth of his and his brothers’ toys, but about seventy-five dollars in fives and tens from the toll road that I’d put on the counter and assumed my wife had used food shopping or something.
*The day he discovered that money is also paper that crinkles — especially the fresh bills from the toll road cash machine — was a dark one indeed.
Thank goodness for that link, because I could really use fifty lab tables treated with Wilsonart® Chemsurf® chemical-laminate just now . . .
Like I said, I’m more than happy to take your money, so long as you don’t expect any actual tables in return.
I liked the imputing of grades. So much more inherent to the person, somehow.
I hadn’t noticed that. Nothing humbles a person quite like a four year old typo. (Well, multiple typos on the first page of a dissertation, but that would never happen to anyone we know.)
You can fix those with vise-grips.
…some duct tape, and a can of WD-40. I did grow up in the South, so I know the gospel.
That is the best! Was he saving up to buy something? Unfortunately we’re on a futon on a frame so it isn’t there.
We now have a pair of cats that includes a male who loves to fetch. What he loves to fetch most is a crumpled up receipt. The rustling of fresh cash sounds like the crumpling of a receipt to the cat ear so if I check the cash in my wallet I have to close the door or he goes apeshit.
He also is really good at noting where the wonderful crinkly cash goes. So I catch him digging in my purse. He’ll dig at pants pockets. He sticks his head in places I used to put cash before I got him.
Of course it is my husband’s word about a cat stealing the ring.
Was he saving up to buy something?
Like most Maine Coons, he’s a Bond-villain in a cat-suit, so I’m just glad I stopped him from purchasing whatever it was he had in mind. When he was born, we thought he was a she and named “her” “Kali.” Despite changing his name to “Virgil” upon discovering his balls, the spirit of his original name had apparently already saturated his soul. Point being, there’s no bad behavior in which he hasn’t engaged in — he’s just lucky he’s so damn cute. Evolution served him well.
See, this is why I always name my cats after forest creatures in stories.
Altho Puck was a bit of a pain…
Our Maine Coon is more the Maxwell Smart Villain in an illfitting cat suit, I’m happy to say. Definitely evil, but competence is somehow eternally just beyond the tips of her claws. Grumpy and Bossy is the limit of her effective range.
He’s just putting your money under your mattress for you in anticipation of the financial system collapsing. He’s trying to do you a favor!
The cat running away with my ring almost caused a divorce. I was pregnant, and had removed my rings because my fingers were swollen, and the next morning, my one-carat diamond engagement ring was gone.
My husband didn’t believe me about the cat until several months later when Galahad jumped up on my dresser, pawed through some jewelry and ran off with another ring.
It was only then that my husband bought me a new ring.
And we never found either ring.
“Galahad”? That bastard!
I believe it. My cat likes to steal pens off my desk. There are at least two that I’ve never found.
I’m actually taking a MVX class in April – I’ll have to ask them about toilet seat removal techniques.
How to remove a ring from your finger without a firearm
Marlo: Don’t seem possible.
Chris: It don’t.
Just as much weird stuff happens to me as to SEK–it’s just that the stuff that happens to SEK is somehow funnier . . .
It’s all about the framing. I’m essentially a professional shlimazel, as far as the Internet’s concerned, so when I describe my life thus, it rings true.
It’s all about the framing.
That’s so true. I have a story about arguing before the state Supreme Court that’s . . . mildly amusing at best. When the same thing happened to Sponge Bob, though, the whole world laughed hysterically . . .
For a minute I thought it was a guide on how not to shoot your husband.
I thought it was a guide on how to shoot your husband with a crossbow.
Hahaha. Men.
I was on a vacation to Manhattan with my husband, and I tripped on a curbstone, fell, and in addition to hitting my head and scraping my face up, I jammed my left ring-finger, hard.
My finger began to swell, and I could not get off the ring. The next morning, we wandered all over the West Village until we found an open locksmith, and asked him to cut my wedding ring off. He looked in askance at my bruised and battered face, and at my husband who was escorting me, but he did finally cut off my wedding ring.
It was a cheap, thin gold band we’d bought when quite poor, so it wasn’t worth much. i never bothered to replace it.
I love how you withheld your gender until the end there. Nicely played.
Ohhhhkay, I see the word ‘husband’ twice, once in the first line, and no other gender-identifiers at all; what are you running with here, SEK?
Having waited a bit too long into pregnancy to remove my wedding ring, I can verify that the dental floss trick does work, but it does hurt like hell.
Dude. All you had to do in this instance was move to Russia/declare your living space a Kaliningrad-style irrident thereof.
Sheesh.
We should be grateful that SEK’s mother didn’t use the dental floss trick while trying to remove the toilet seat.
Right here is the perfect website for everyone who wants to find out about this topic.
You realize a whole lot its almost tough to argue with you (not
that I personally will need to…HaHa). You certainly put a new spin on a
subject that’s been written about for many years. Excellent stuff, just excellent!