The fire service was called out, not for a fire, nor to extract a child's head from between railings, but because a bee had stung a woman's finger!

The problem was not that she had been stung, but that it was on a pinkie with a ring on it and it had swollen up to such a degree that the finger might have to be amputed if something wasn’t done about it.

This occurred in Cádiar in the lower Alpujarra and it was the local fire service in that town that came to the rescue with a small circular saw. They managed to remove the ring without removing her finger… or anybody else’s who might have been standing too close.

They inserted a thin piece of metal between the woman’s finger and the ring so that there was both a safeguard for her finger and to protect her skin from being burned by the heat generated by the mini-circular saw. The whole operation took 15 minutes.

Believe it or not, fire personnel are used to being called out for removing rings, although the firecrew in Cádiar hadn’t done one for a least a year. However, the fire service in Iznalloz had to remove a ring from a man’s finger this Friday; i.e., yesterday.

(News: Cadiar, Alpujarra, Granada, Andalucia)