Several weeks ago I accompanied my friend to her plastic surgeons office for a presurgical appointment. I don't know if anyone else has this same problem, but medical supplies thrill me to death and I cannot help but to look through all the drawers in the exam rooms before the doctor comes in. Usually I don't find anything good, but this time I hit gold. Dermal punches. Loads of them. I couldn't resist. About 10 or them landed in my purse. Not sure how that happened. Just jumped right out of the drawer.
At A Glance Author Dawn Contact Dawn@bme.anon IAM Dawn When A week ago Artist Myself Studio At home A week later my friend had surgery so the dermal punches got put into my piercing supply/ jewelry box and forgotten about for the most part.
Three weeks later and my friend is on her way to recovery from her surgery and we remember the punches. I start to imagine how beautiful I would be with a 12-gauge conch in my left ear.
My friend does some research on how to use the punches and talks to a few piercers about proper technique. I had no idea on how dermal punches worked and was very interested to find out that basically they are like a little circular razor blade that you shove through much as the same way that you would shove a needle through. We then go and pull out the dermal punch stash and look over the sizes that we have. We have 2mm, 3mm, 4mm, and 6mm. We determine the 2mm to be a 12-gauge and then find a 12-gauge cbb. The cbb was not sterile, but had never been worn by anyone. I absolutely know that this is not a safe thing to do. But I have pierced myself with much worse with no ill side effects. This ends up not being relative though as I didn't end up with any jewelry in my ear.
We get everything together that we need to do the punch. Gloves, paper towels, alcohol, etc. Let me just say that I have been piercing myself at home since I was 11 years old and I do know that it is highly unrecommended and I if I didn't know my own body so well I would not even attempt to do this on myself.
Into the bathroom we go where we will have the best lighting and the easiest clean up. My friend gets the punch ready and marks my ear. And I freak. I start feeling nauseous and getting shaky. It is not so much the pain factor that is making me freak out, but the punch itself. It is just so big and round and scary. And I know that I can't do it. I can't do it on my conch. It is just too thick and I'm afraid. Just the sight of the punch is making me queasy.
So after I calm down a bit we have a bit of a discussion on other things we could do with the punch but ultimately decide to instead just try out the punch on my upper lobe so I can scope out the pain factor. Once again my friend marks me and starts coming at me with the punch. I duck and cover.
I then decide that I need to do this on myself. I always find that it is easier to cause myself pain then to have someone else. So I stand up and look in the mirror and start shoving. I don't know if it was my nerves or what but I could not get the punch to go all the way through. My friend takes the punch from me and tries herself, but she can't get it through either.
I didn't realize it then but maybe we should of used some lubricant on the punch? I am not sure if this is usually done or not, but I have been pierced with a needle without lube before and I know how much harder it is to get through than one with lube is.
After about five minutes of trying to get it through at any cost we give up. I pull the punch out with a nice chunk of flesh in it. My ear starts gushing blood. I figured that I would bleed some even with jewelry in, but this is an incredible amount of blood. I hold gauze and cotton to it for a good half hour until it stops bleeding.
Looking at it in the mirror afterwards I now have a nice perfectly shaped circle on my ear. It is all scabbed up today, but I am hoping it scars in the circle shape. I don't think anyone will really notice it but me, but that will not make it any less cool to look at.
As for the rest of the punches, I don't know what I will be doing with them. They will NOT be coming anywhere near me. I'll take a needle any day, but those punches are the devil!
I know I titled this "play piercing", and that is not entirely accurate. But it did turn into a fun experience and I didn't end up with jewelry. Maybe it would be more accurately called scarification?