I've had my ears pierced since I was about five years old. Since I've been about 13 though, I've wanted second holes. I used to live in Thailand though, and although I know loads of people who've gotten various piercing while living there, I never wanted to get one done there because they were usually done out on the street in an unclean, unsanitary environment, and the jewelry they used was cheap. I have a nickel allergy so I needed something I could trust.
At A Glance Author moxie Contact scarlet_chaos@hotmail.com When Two years ago Artist My Ex Studio My Dorm Room Location Arizona Anyway, fast forward to 2003. My family and I end up moving to Alaska, which means back to the States, and back to cleaner piercing conditions. However, my dad was definitely against me getting my second holes. My mom didn't mind, but she didn't really have the time to take me to a piercing place. Also, this was back in High School and my mother was less inclined to do nice things for me when we were fighting all the time. Which is fine.
A year later, I've moved to Arizona to attend college. I end up meeting a boy who I'll eventually end up dating on and off for a year. The cool thing about him was the fact that he had his left ear lobe pierced twice. I asked him about it, and discovered that he'd done them himself. He then proceeded to tell me that while he was in high school, he was known to pierce a lot of people's ears, and had taken to carrying around a small container with all the things he'd need to pierce anyone's ears. I'd just met him, but practically begged him to pierce my second holes. He said that when we had the supplies we could get them done.
So a couple months later, after a night of too much drinking and partying with complete strangers, I ended up at the boy's dorm. I was drunk and asked if he could pierce my ears. (Bad idea, I KNOW, since I was drunk and I strongly recommend that if you get anything pierced you do it sober as a judge.) He had a couple of needles but no rubbing alcohol and no spare earrings. That's fine, I told him. I could deal without the spare earrings. I had my earrings in from my first holes so I figured we could just use those ones if we could clean them. Well, we ran around that entire building trying to find someone with rubbing alcohol, but either nobody had any or no body wanted the boy to pierce the loud drunk girl.
Fine fine fine. No piercing for me, I think. But then I remembered then that my roommate had a big bottle of rubbing alcohol at my dorm, which was about half a mile away. So me and the boy make the trek in the cold Arizona desert to my dorm. By this time, nearly four hours had passed since my arrival at the boy's dorm, and I was practically sober, which was nice.
We get there and the boy sets about his job of setting up and sterilizing the needles and the hypoallergenic earrings I had. I sit anxiously on my bed waiting for the boy, and watch as he burns my two biggest safety pin needles and then wipe them clean with rubbing alcohol. I'm pretty sure that this is not the most sterile thing to be doing, especially in my own bedroom because I'm kind of messy. But I really really wanted my ears done, so I threw caution to the wind and let the boy pierce me.
First, he asked if I planned on wearing large studs or small studs, which was a weird question, so I just made sure he marked my ears up and then I took a look. I found the placement okay, so he went ahead and stuck me on the right earlobe first. It went straight in, no problems. He closed the safety pin and proceeded to work on my left earlobe. That one was a bit more of a problem. I could feel the tissue crunch under the needle, which I'm sure isn't supposed to happen with earlobes. After he looked at it for a second he realized that the left earlobe was off. So he took the safety pin out of my ear and remarked it, then re-sterilized the needle and tried again. This time it went in smoothly with no crunching or anything.
Then the boy put the jewelry in, which slightly hurt, mostly from him yanking the safety pin out of my ear and jamming the jewelry in before the holes closed. But he got everything in okay and told I was done.
I took a look and was SO PLEASED. I asked him how to sleep on my ears, to which the boy was just like, you sleep however you want. He wasn't very good with the aftercare instructions, but whatever. I turned the studs everyday and cleaned them once (about every week or so) in a while with rubbing alcohol. The dull pain in my ears from over playing with them subsided a couple weeks after the initial piercing.
And it's been two years and I still have them in. I wouldn't advise getting your friends to ghetto rig your piercing like mine did, and I wouldn't advise doing them yourself either, but I'm not going to lie, it's very easy to get done by yourself or a friend and in my experience, it almost always turns out okay.