At A Glance
Author	strawberry
Contact	strawberry@bme.anon
IAM	strawberry
When	A year ago

The moment dermal punches arrived at the studio where I used to work everybody got really excited. We didn't really know how to use them and before using them on customers we thought it would have been much better to try them on ourselves, and we started looking for volunteers.
My former boss, M, (who's not proud of this experience, and who I'm
sure would prefer not to have her name associated with it) suggested to try it on herself. It worked fine on her ear. She used a tiny 4 mm (6 ga)dermal punch on her lobe and loved it. She didn't put any jewelry in it, though, because she didn't want any and was only road testing the new arrival. My friend V and me were the next in line. Seeing that she did survive we were willing to try it ourselves, because half curious and half careless.

We decided that I was the one to go first.I have a large-ish gauge piercing in my left lobe and was planning to stretch the right one, so I didn't want to mess with either of them. At this point I wasn't sure about helix or conch placement, and in the end decided for the helix.I chose a beautiful 6 ga surgical steel tunnel and it was sterilized.I was made to sit on the dentist chair where we normally pierce, they helped me fix my hair so that it wouldn't go on my ears, M disinfected my left helix carefully, wore a fresh pair of gloves and opened the dermal punch which was still in its sterile package. Basically (and to date I'm not sure this was correct), she just put the tool on my cartilage and pushed.

I could hear a clear, distinct noise of my cartilage breaking and a flush of pain.I probably screamed, too. Then a hot sensation and some blood, too, but less than I expected.The dermal punch was out really quick, it probably took it 4 seconds in total, and M is quite fast anyway.The pain had been intense and my eyes were blurry and I got a bit dizzy but I was fine.Time to insert the tunnel.And this is where the problems started. Good people do research, bad people go without it, but it's only the lucky ones who get away with everything they do. We weren't lucky. M tried to push the tunnel in. The tunnel didn't want to go in at all and I was screaming with pain (part of it was realizing that we didn't know what we were doing, after all), and this hurt much more than the dermal punch itself. A few months later, reading experiences on BME I found out that you need a taper, but back then we weren't ready all, and didn't give much thought to it. We just imagined that jewerly could just go in. Actually, after a third failed attempt to push the tunnel into my punched helix M did suggest we taper it, but I was just much happier leaving, rather than going through more torture. Torture it was, at that point, because cartilage hurts and an angry, wounded cartilage hurts even more. Any more pain an I'd be lying on the floor, I figured.So I told her to stop, which she did. She cleaned my ear from blood and gave me a glass of water and some chocolate. I'm a big baby in situations like this.

Later that day I went home, purchased some topic antibiotic spray that had worked wonders for my rook and for a number of other piercing-related troubles, and I applied it three times a day for about a week. My ear was in a lot of pain for the first few days, but it began shrinking quite soon. To date, I still have a hole and a scar where the dermal punch had been and because it does remove skin I doubt it will ever shrink to nothing completely. Luckily, the antibiotic worked really well and I didn't have any major problems with the hole. In the future I might consider putting jewelry in there, or stretch it a bit and go to the actual 6 ga that we'd planned, but I'm fine as I am now and the pain I went through puts me off going any further in the area. I'm not exactly happy with the way things went but it's an experience and you learn a lot by your mistakes and it was a good thing that M tried it on me and herself before messing up with customers. I'm almost sure she doesn't do dermal punches now, though, so I guess she did learn from her mistakes, too, and will punch only after proper research.

Disclaimer: needless to say that you shouldn't do it. If you want to try something make sure you know what's going on and what the procedure is.Punching and pushing would be like piercing and removing the needle and everything, hoping the jewelry would just go in.Simply, it doesn't work like that and lack of knowledge is the perfect recipe for disaster. Know your practitioner. Know your tools. Educate yourself. At the end of the day, play safe. Dermal punches are fun, but the results are permanent. The can be great or bad, like in my case. And don't let a bad story put you off mods: instead try and learn and do it safer next time round!

Happy punching (so it should be-happy!)