How Ellen DeGeneres Wound Up in the ER After Wine-Related Accident

On Tuesday's episode of her popular talk show, Ellen DeGeneres took the humorous route to discuss a recent visit to the hospital.

While showing off a splint on her finger, DeGeneres told the audience, "I have something to show you — it's that right here. Can you see it? I broke my finger. I know what you're thinking: 'How can you host a show without the tip of your ring finger?!' I'm not going to let this thing beat me. I am not!”

“I'll tell you what happened,” she went on. “So, you know how in gymnastics when you do a one-handed cartwheel and you have to spread the weight evenly between all your fingers? Well, I had two glasses of wine and fell into a door.”

Ellen and wife Portia de Rossi were arriving home from a dinner party when the accident happened. “It did something to my finger — I knew something was wrong.”

My first thought was: 'No big deal, Obamacare will cover this,'” she joked. “So, Portia drove me to the hospital, to the emergency room. When I got there, of course the receptionist had so many things for me to sign — a picture for her nephew, a T-shirt for her… No, they were wonderful. UCLA, thank you so much. There were a lot of people that were helpful, but Tammy, thank you so much. Tammy was my nurse that was taking care of me."

Ellen elaborated, "But anyways, turns out I didn't break it: I dislocated my finger. That's what they call it, which is an incorrect term because I knew where it was located. It was just wrongly located is what it was.”

"Do you know what they do when you dislocate your finger?” she asked the audience. “It's very technical. What they do is they take the part that's dislocated and then they just snap it right back into place. You can see why they have to go to eight years of medical school.”

Ellen's nurse eventually asked if she wanted a shot to numb the pain. Ellen replied, “I said: 'No, I had two glasses of wine — that's what got me into this mess in the first place, Tammy.' She said: 'You're going to feel a little prick, and then some burning.' There was burning, all right. Burning followed by cursing is what happened. Just think of any curse word and I said that. I invented three new ones, actually.”