I spent Sunday morning down at casuality feeling a bit of a fraud. Woke up on Saturday morning with my left hand ring finger swollen, probably by caused by a reaction to some type of insect bite. Despite my wife's best attempts using soap, water and ice we could not get my wedding ring off. Being ever optimistic I assumed the swelling would die down and having a head cold I wasn't at my best and so had an early night.
However, when I woke up on Sunday morning I was in real trouble. My finger as a fetching purple colour and my wedding ring was starting to bite into the flesh. We called a doctor and he tried to remove the ring by wrapping a ribbon around the finger and unravelling it to pull the ring off. I didn't actually faint with the pain but the amount of blood running off my finger and sweat streaming off my forehead persauded him to stop (and probably my wimpering as well). In the end he suggested we get the wedding ring cut off. A suggestion that was, of course, a real winner with my wife :(
So off down to casualty we went. The staff at the Apollo hospital emergency unit in Colombo were excellent. I spent an hour or so with an ice pack on my finger. Then they tried a variety of methods to cut my wedding ring off. The usual tool they used proved insufficient. I had a welsh gold wedding ring which was dual banded. Obviously heavy duty and counter acted all attempts to cut it. At one stage we had five hospital staff in the room trying to help get the ring off.
It was whilst the doctor was attempting to cut the ring that I realised what a disadvantage I was at not speaking the local language, Sinhala. The doctors were chatting away to themselves and I caught yabber yabber gangrene yabber yabber. WWWOOOWWW I thought. It didn't get much better when I caught yabber yabber engineer yabber yabber electrician yabber yabber. However, that did produce a frightening rusty, oily & dirty pair of cutters that did actually do the business and cut the ring off.
So the finger is all bandaged up. But at least no pain. A lot of grief from the wife about the symbolism about having my wedding ring cut off. However, I have promised to have it repaired and mounted on a chain I will keep around my neck. And finger rings are definitely not on my agenda any more.