After a two-week hiatus, Jimmy Fallon is back knocking the socks off his audience on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, with all his 10 fingers in place, although one of them won't be any good for the next couple of months.
Fallon explains his disappearance from the show stems from an injury called ring avulsion, a rather graphic injury that Fallon warns anyone without a penchant for gruesome images not to Google. Ring avulsion is actually a spectrum of injuries that can range from contusion to amputation, and judging from Fallon's description of what happened to him, his finger found itself on the more deadly end of the spectrum.
"I tripped and fell in my kitchen on a braided rug that my wife loves and I can't wait to burn it to the ground," he says (video). "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 wide world.' It completely looks fake. It looks like a cheap horror movie where you see a broken finger."
Fallon says he wrapped his hand in a bath towel and rushed to the Beth Israel E.R., where he was advised to go to the Bellevue Hospital in New York City instead because he would need microsurgery to fix his finger. There, he describes his doctor as a bow tie and cowboy boot-donning man and how, the minute Fallon saw him, he knew he was going to be his finger's savior.
As it turns out, his doctor truly was a savior, since most cases of ring avulsion often end up in having the finger cut off. His doctor successfully completed the surgery under a microscope, taking a vein from Fallon's foot and transferring it to his finger. Still, Fallon had to spend 10 days in the intensive care unit, reading up on the meaning of life, specifically Victor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," and watching The Duff, what Fallon says to be the Mean Girls of 2015, three times.
"To the nurses and doctors over at Bellevue Hospital, thank you so much for taking care of me. I love you guys," Fallon says. "It's a tough, tough job. You guys are rock stars and just awesome, awesome people."
As for his wedding ring, it too got deformed during the fall and is now back at the jeweler's for repair. However, after what happened to his finger, the comedian says he loves his wife but is now scared out of his wits to put the ring back on.
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