An Overlooked Bit Of Hand Safety: Take Your Rings Off Regularly
If you wear rings regularly, especially for months or years at a time, like wedding rings, you need to start removing the rings frequently. You don't have to stop wearing them, but you should take them off and put them back on so that you can see if there are any issues with your fingers that would prevent you from removing the ring later on. Your fingers can swell for whatever reason, and if you don't keep checking to see if you can get the ring off, you could find one day that you can't remove the ring when you really need to.
Stuck Before You Know It
Water retention, injury, weight gain, hormonal imbalances, and more can make your fingers swell. Arthritis, too, can make joints swell even if the rest of your finger does not. If you never remove your ring -- and there are many people who just never take off wedding rings or other sentimental rings -- you might not even realize that your fingers are swelling.
All you really have to do is slip the ring off for a second. Do this daily, preferably; in fact, since rings are known to be a hygiene risk (pathogens can get caught under the ring, and water and soap can't always wash the pathogens out), take this opportunity to wash your hand without the ring and to wash the ring itself.
Consequences
A stuck ring is more than an inconvenience. It could cause practical problems like not being able to go through a metal detector at a courthouse, for example, but it can also create health problems. If the finger is swelling up underneath the ring, the band won't expand -- it will start to cut into your skin, bruising tissue and increasing your risk of infection. The constriction caused by the ring can be painful and cut off circulation to the rest of your finger.
What You Can Try
If the problem is soft-tissue swelling like water retention, or if you've gained weight, you can try using window cleaner or hemorrhoid cream as lubricants to make the ring slip off more easily without dragging skin with it. You can also wrap your finger with dental floss, just in front of the ring, to compress the tissue. Move the ring up onto the section wrapped in floss, and keep wrapping ahead of the ring until you can move the ring off your finger.
What to Do if That Didn't Work
If you know the problem is temporary (water retention due to PMS, for example), and if you're not in pain and the ring hasn't cut into your skin, you can try waiting. But if you are in pain, if you can't get the ring past arthritis-swollen knuckles, or if you notice the rest of your finger turning different colors because the circulation is being cut off, go to an emergency room to get the ring cut off. (You can get the ring repaired later -- save your finger first!) Some jewelry stores don't like to risk cutting the ring because of the possibility of cutting your finger, too, so while you could try going to one of those, you may find you have to head to the hospital.
This seems like such a small thing to someone who has never experienced it before, but getting a ring stuck, really stuck, on your finger can be serious. Talk to a doctor about what to do if you find your hand swelling constantly, too. You need to find the root cause of that swelling and control it.
For a hand doctor, click this link http://www.towncenterorthopaedics.com or do an online search.