Two years ago this day I stepped into a car, headed south from the jersey coast and drove five hours to get my ears cut by one of the most skilled piercers I had ever met. I had seen his portfolio on bme and looked through it countless times, focusing largely on the pseudo-surgical piercing procedures but also being impressed by the then small, but growing collection of scarification pieces he had completed. My ears had been a trouble spot for me ever since I began stretching them five years prior - my left ear always swelled and become horribly raw every time the tissue was stretched, even after waiting nearly half a year between stretches and limiting them to a warm shower with a steel taper and a huge tube of lube. I had taken them to 2g after all of that time but put off going bigger for a number of reasons, not the least of which were fears that I would forever after remain unemployable by uptight managers demanding the most professional of appearances. The physiological problems I was having with stretching was just another added motivation, and what the opinions of the general public might be had also kind of crept into the back of my mind. My piercings had never drawn much attention before, always interesting and eye-catching, maybe, but never enough to draw actual gasps or cause strange middle-aged women to grab an earlobe and attempt to shove a finger through it. I was kind of worried about losing the ability to just blend into a crowd.
At A Glance Author joshua Contact joshua@bme.anon When Two years ago The only way I could see myself actually taking the plunge would be to do it in one fell swoop, and scalpelling seemed like the best answer - it would be a big jump, real fast, and would make future stretches all the easier. I was also hoping to correct a slightly uncentered piercing in the process. I made my arrangements with the artist, stopped into a local shop to pick up and autoclave some extra long single-flared pyrex eyelets with silicone backings, got into a friends car and headed down the coast.
After getting lost and stuck behind three miles of backed up traffic, we found ourselves in the driveway of said artist's house and later his living room, looking through private portfolios and talking scarification and waiting for the tools in the procedural room to finish their run through the autoclave. We discussed the actual procedure, deciding to actually remove a small bit of tissue from each ear rather than the sharp slit that would just facilitate a stretch. The artist explained how doing it this way would make for a much more natural look, as well as cut down on any pressure issues - two problems I had seen from a scalpelling job I'd done by a jersey local. He also promised the use of anesthetic, which I hadn't been expecting and was pleasantly surprised to hear about. We were to use xylocaine 2% with epinephrine to lessen the bleeding, ordered straight out of Canada. We discussed toxicity issues and more procedurals, and the man knew how to inject, how much to inject, and what to look for after injecting. It wasn't long before I was in the procedural room, a sterile little cell that could have come straight out of any hospital. There was a statim sitting a few yards away from his couch. It was beautiful.
He first had me sit in the dentist's chair so he could mark the area to be cut, then lie down as he cleaned the area and injected the xylocaine. This felt like a sharp prick followed by a long, intense burning which was easily the most uncomfortable part of the entire procedure. We waited a few minutes for the anesthetic's shifting of the tissue to die down a bit and to make sure it had kicked in, after which he took the dispoable number 11 scalpel out of its autoclaved packet and being slicing a circle out of my ear. The sensation wasn't painful, as the xylocaine had pretty much killed all chance of that, but the blade felt as if it was sawing back and forth through the flesh of my earlobe, and this was horribly disconcerting and made me just a little nervous about going through with all of this. The man told me I was sitting really well for it, and my friend took pictures and said it was fucking cool to watch, but I saw in that chair with my eyes clenched and my hands balled into fists trying my hardest not to think about the dull, sawing sensation going on an inch from my head. The artist was finished shortly after he had started, and I could tell immediately as there was the soft sensation of something popping out of my ear. I began to breath again as he shoved the 0g and then the 00g steel taper through the fresh hole and followed it with the glass eyelets, and felt only a slight pressure in my ears with the passing of each. The procedure was identical for the other ear, and after he had applied pressure to each ear with a sterile gauze until the blood had stopped draining from each of the cuts, we were on our way north again. The anesthetic wore off a half an hour into the trip back, and the endorphins shortly after, and I noticed a dull pain throughout the rest of the drive. This became more tolerable with a few ibuprofen, and later the next day with warm sea salt soaks, and it wasn't five weeks before they felt and looked completely healed. I've since stretched them slightly past the half-inc "\Ãw€ë h mark, and after fitting them with a few new pieces of Portland gray from glasswear studios, couldn't be happier with them.