Dear Mr. Mooney and team,
I wanted to write to thank you as I, and more importantly my son, were the beneficiaries of one of your ring cutting kits. My 13 year old son decided he wanted to "accessorize" with a few rings from Amazon with a gift card he recently received for his birthday. Unbeknownst to me, after they arrived on Tuesday night (November 19th), he decided to place (or I should say force) one of them on his ring finger. When he woke up in the morning, he was unable to remove it and it was clear his finger was swollen and the knuckle it would need to pass over looked like a difficult feat. Before rushing to carpool, we tried ice and oil and lotion and I sent him off to school with the instructions to see the nurse at lunch if it hadn't worked its way off by then and certainly to seek help earlier if his circulation was being cut off or the swelling got worse.
With no luck removing it in the morning, he went to the school nurse who fortunately was a former ER nurse with a lot of experience in this area. She tried the dental floss trick, ice, elevation, oil and everything else she could think of. Unfortunately, no success. She called and left a message that in her estimation this was not coming off naturally and would need to be cut off. So I picked him up at school and proceeded to take him to our local FD which has been working tirelessly fighting the wildfires that unfortunately have been too close to our home and community in recent weeks. This particular Tuesday, however, we were receiving some unusual and much needed rain which meant the firefighters were not out fighting local fires and we received a warm welcome from about 7 firefighters who were at the firehouse awaiting their next emergency. They were amazing and had the best intentions and were determined to safely remove the ring from my son's finger. However, they were ill-equipped to do battle against a two-ply stainless steel ring (good thing it wasn't the tungsten carbide ring that got stuck!) without putting my son's fingers and hand at risk. They tried multiple manual ring cutters that were no match for this particular accessory. They even tried to use a hand held hack saw with as much protection as they could possibly provide to my son's hand, but this too proved no match.
At this point, I was getting more concerned about what the potential solutions and outcomes might be here and called our local ER at UCLA/St. John's Hospital. I relayed the situation and inquired if they had any specialized equipment that might be able to do the trick. They told me that in fact they did, but I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical as it was hard for me to envision that such a specialized tool would exist, especially that could cut through something as thick as this dual-banded stainless steel. I thanked the firefighters for their service and effort but I know they were disappointed they could not help us out. I asked if I could make a donation or do anything for their time and they declined any such thing. So off we went to the ER...
We arrived at the ER and we went through the registration process. We were eventually brought into a separate room in the ER and shortly thereafter someone arrived with a Mooney Ring Cutting kit. As soon as I saw it, hope reappeared and I felt like this was all going to turn out ok. And it did. Once the cutter was applied to the ring surface, there was never a doubt that this was going to end well and that the almost 24 hour ordeal would come to an end with a successful outcome.
So thank you for putting your product out into the market. I'm sure this wasn't the first and won't be the last teenager to get a ring stuck like mine, and certainly there are a lot of very serious use cases where your device has saved the day. There should be one of these accessible to every community and I wish you success in your efforts to do so. I will certainly relay this ordeal and try to do my part in increasing awareness that this product exists and its effectiveness. Thanks again.
Best regards,
Marc