Jimmy Fallon Explains Finger Injury During ‘Tonight Show’ Return

Jimmy Fallon finally addressed the finger injury that kept him from hosting The Tonight Show for two weeks on Monday night’s episode.

Jimmy Fallon Talks Finger Injury

“I was going to lose my finger!” Fallon told the crowd, adding that he had to spend 10 days in the ICU at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. Fortunately, after arriving at Beth Israel and being informed that he’d suffered a ring avulsion, he was sent to Bellevue where Dr. David Chu was able to perform a surgery to fix his hand.

“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. I tripped and fell and I caught my fall,” Fallon explained. “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!”

“Apparently, the odds aren’t great and usually they cut your finger off, but this guy did microsurgery for over six hours and had to take a vein out of my foot,” Fallon added. “This is the craziest story — I was knocked out and didn’t know any of this.”

“He had to take a vein out of my foot. It’s a crazy story! So he took a vein out of my foot and put it in there,” said Fallon, further explaining his surgery. “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’s hand was still heavily bandaged during taping, and he’s not expected to have full feeling in his finger for another eight weeks.

Following The Tonight Show, the former Saturday Night Live castmember took to Twitter to thank his fans for their continued support.

Fallon also responded to a couple tweeters – one who knows someone who suffered a similar injury and had his finger amputated, and another who decided not to heed his warnings about Googling “ring avulsion.”