Two health care centers and a hospital were unable to extract a ring from the increasingly swollen finger of a young schoolboy on Tuesday, and the threat was only quelled with the experienced intervention of a jewelry store. The Civil Defense, however, said that it could all have been resolved much sooner if they had been called. Abdulrahman Al-Oufi first became alarmed as he sat in class and observed his finger swell up painfully, prompting teaching staff to call in his father who rushed him to a nearby medical center. Unable to resolve the problem “due to not having the right cutting equipment”, Abdulrahman was then taken to a medical room at a local school, but staff there were equally confounded. The boy's father then took him slightly further afield to a regional hospital, but was met with the same response. With seemingly nowhere left to turn, Abdulrahman was taken to a local jewelry store which finally provided an undisclosed solution with the minimum of fuss. Mansour Al-Juhani, the Madina spokesman for the Civil Defense, advised the public, however, to turn to his men in such incidents. “People should call the Civil Defense Operations Room and its specialized teams,” Al-Juhani said. The possible existence of a ring squad may be the result of a series of ring-trapped finger incidents across the Kingdom, the most recent being less than a month ago when emergency crews from the Civil Defense in Al-Jouf sped to attend to a 15-year-old boy whose finger had started to bloat alarmingly. Efforts on the part of the boy's family to dislodge the ring had proved fruitless, but the ring squad succeeded where they failed, leaving the teenage digit without any permanent damage. “They showed great skill in dealing with the issue,” said the teen's father of the Civil Defense's handling of the emergency. Officials in Al-Jouf said it was the fourth such case to occur in the region in two months.
