Ariel Winter Cut Part of Her Thumb Off While Cooking, Threw It Away
Yikes! Ariel Winter is sporting a bandaged thumb after a recent unfortunate cooking accident that almost led her to lose a portion of her finger forever.
“I had chopped four onions just before I chopped this one thing. Chopped four onions and it was great — I just got new knives too,” the Modern Family alum, 22, told Access on Wednesday, May 6, via a video interview as she held her bandaged hand up to the camera. “So I went to chop a peeled tomato and sliced the top part of my thumb off on a peeled tomato.”
The Kiss Kiss Bang Bang star said the incident occurred when she was trying to make Greek food in an effort to honor that part of her heritage. She also noted that it took her and boyfriend Luke Benward a few moments to realize the full extent of her injury.
When Winter grasped that a portion of her thumb was missing, the panic set in. “I was so shocked … it was more like I was hyperventilating. I was like, ‘I should be crying but I just can’t believe it.’”
Given the seriousness of Winter’s injury, Benward, 24, grabbed the tip of her finger and drove her to a nearby hospital. Once there, the Dumplin star handed the chunk of flesh over to a nurse. Meanwhile, doctors determined that Winter had “sliced an artery,” which caused her to bleed “so much.”
Once the California native was all bandaged up, a nurse handed her back the MIA portion of her finger. “She actually just gave it to me in a plastic bag and didn’t, like, tell me that it was the tip of my thumb, so I accidentally threw it away and we had to go get it,” Winter recalled with a laugh.
Though the actress realizes the ordeal is “very funny now,” she admitted it didn’t exactly feel that way at the time. “It definitely hurt and wasn’t fun,” she said.
However, given the current coronavirus crisis, Winter, who noted she received “great care” from hospital staff, was able to put her own ordeal into perspective. “Obviously I was bleeding a lot, but again, it’s my thumb,” she explained. “Like, so many people are in [the hospital] for so much worse and I was like, you know, I was perfectly fine.”
She continued: “I sliced my thumb off and it’s sad, I’ll have a mildly sad-looking thumb, but it’ll be OK … During all this, this is the least of anyone’s worries.”
While cooking might not be on Winter’s agenda again in the near future, she has discovered Pokémon Go, which has kept her entertained during quarantine. “Occasionally I will drive around for, like, a mile or two in my car at night and catch Pokémon,” she said. “It gets me out of my house and I have my windows down and I’m doing my thing.”
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