Stuck rings and other things
From bathing suits to relationships, some of us know the feeling of trying on something that fits at first and then sticks like Super Glue – like it or not.
In this “Stuck Things” category stuck rings represent the universal object.
Some slide on, but won’t slide off without soapy water, Vaseline, or dental floss wrapped in front of the ring to compress the skin and make a waxy path for it to travel off the finger.
These tricks usually work. But if not, get ready to meet the ring kings (and queens) – the people with tools and kits who specialize in freeing your finger from its unwanted cuff.
Since unwanted cuffs come in just about every description, the following straightforward stuck ring story seemed like a great way to process more intangible stuck things stories — from a stuck mindset to a stuck career or anything that you picked up easily and now cannot pull off.
This stuck ring story begins one morning last month when our friend James, 13, tried on a classmate’s ring purchased for $7 last summer at a national park in Utah. James realized he could not pull it off his right hand middle finger almost instantly.
So, school staff tried all the tricks to no avail. Then, they called the fire department.
The big rig showed up at the school, and the crew brought James on board. But they could not remove it.
Next, school staff drove him to a walk-in urgent care that closed before staff there could give up. So, James went to another walkin urgent care.
That’s when our friend’s grandmother — herself indisposed that day with a routine medical procedure — reached out to my husband, David, to stay with James through the ordeal.
David has some flexibility at work. So, he stepped into the stuck ring story at the second urgent care, which eventually referred James to the nearest hospital emergency department — Boulder Community Health in Boulder.
There, staff tried to snip off the ring with the usual Leatherman Raptor Emergency Response Shears tool used in earlier interventions. But the ring broke the tool’s snipper tooth.
By then all the pressure and wiggling of so many extrication attempts at four other places had caused James’ finger to balloon past the ring to the fingernail. It started turning blue, too — although he never lost sensation.
It looked hopeless until a technician self-identified as “The Ring Guy” showed up with two special ring cutter kits.
By now, James and David knew that however cheap, the ring likely was made of hardened steel. So, the technician pulled out his Mooney Ring Cutting System, a black box with a battery-powered rotary tool. Then, he shimmied an ultrathin metal strip under the tight ring to protect the skin before he set to work sawing.
This friction caused so much heat during the fiveminute procedure that the technician asked David to cool the metal with syringes of sterile water as he worked.
Then, to everyone’s great relief, the tool split the ring. It still took the technician pulling one side with a wire cutter and David pulling the other side with a needle nosed pliers to pry it open, though. And this explains why the technician told James that he took the prize as his toughest stuck ring case yet.
But debriefing tough cases comes with golden eggs.
I’m not sure what’s there for you. But for me, it matters that James reported his problem. That he took it seriously and tried to fix it before the ring acted like a tourniquet — something that would stop his lifeblood from nourishing a part of who he is.
I also love this stuck ring story for how James’ family — friends we camp, fish, hike and eat with — reached out when they needed help.
We would do likewise in a role reversal.
If you need help, ask and keep moving to find it. A community of caring people are in position to do just that. And sometimes they are closer than you think.
The technician who succeeded where others had failed told James his daughter attended the same school.
Finally, you are not the first person with a stuck ring or another stuck thing. Go after getting unstuck!
What would it feel like to release the pressure and the pain that being stuck causes? How might that redirect the river of your life?
After the ordeal, James kept the ring. The original owner no longer wanted it because it no longer seemed like a souvenir from a distant national park. Instead, it became a souvenir for something better — a mangled reminder to me, if not James — of the beauty of this kind of brokenness.