Jimmy Fallon returns, reveals he almost lost finger in accident
Jimmy Fallon returned to the TV airwaves Monday night for the first time in two weeks, marking his first show since his hand injury.
And boy, did he have a story.
Fallon detailed his accident on "The Tonight Show," revealing that he was in the ICU for 10 days and likely won't get feeling back in his finger for eight weeks.
"So basically what happened is I tripped and fell on a braided rug that my wife loved, and I can't wait to burn it to the ground," Fallon revealed. "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 world.' It completely looks fake, like in a cheap horror movie where you see a broken finger. It looks like that! That's what it looks like. So I wrap my hand in a towel and I get in a cab and go to the emergency room. I go, 'I broke my finger! I think I broke my finger!' And they look and they go, 'Oh, you didn't break your finger.'"
It turns out, Fallon had something a little different.
"It's a thing called ring avulsion," he explained. "A-V-U-L-S-I-O-N. If you Google it, it's graphic images. Don't Google it. But ring avulsion, it's a real thing...My ring got caught on a countertop when I was going down and stuck there and pulled my finger out," he explained. "Trust me, I'm like, 'Wait, what?' I didn't even look at the thing. So I go, 'Can you fix it?' And they go, 'Oh, no. No. We've got to send you somewhere else.'"
The former "SNL" star ended up going having to go to Bellevue Hospital, where doctors performed microsurgery on his finger. He praised the staff there, specifically Dr. David Chiu. Fallon says Dr. Chui, who waltzed into the hospital room with a bowtie and cowboy boots, "saved" his finger.
Things could have been much worse, he said.
Fallon revealed the "odds aren't great with these things...Usually they just cut your finger off. So, I was going to lose my finger. And I was like, 'Wow.' So this guy did surgery for like six hours--microsurgery--so it's like under a microscope. He had to take a vein out of my foot. It's a crazy story! I didn't know this was happening because I was knocked out at this point. So he took a vein out of my foot and put it in there....Veins only work one way...so you have to remember which way and reverse it, and if you're putting it together and you do one missed stitch or something like that, the vein closes up and it's useless. You screwed up and it's not going to happen. And he did it. He saved my finger."
Fallon went on to describe how he spent his time over the past couple of weeks. His hospital stint included a lot of reading (find-the-meaning-of-life books), watching the 2015 teen movie "The Duff" (three times) and tuning in to "The Real Housewives of New York."
All of that, though, reminded Fallon that he's in the right profession, he said.
"But really I was watching TV and I was reading this meaning of life thing and I think, 'This is the meaning of my life. I belong in TV and I should be talking to people who are watching who are either in an ICU--or wherever you are, at home--if anyone's suffering at all, this is my job. I'm here to make you laugh. I want to make you have a good time," he said.
Watch the segment below:
