Within the past two years or so I had began to make friends who had a fair amount of body modifications, and began to get interested in the community myself. I started spending a lot of time looking through BME's sample galleries, marveling at what people had done to their bodies. I knew a tattoo wasn't something I wanted to rush into, that was permanent, and I wanted it to mean something. Piercings intrigued me, so I decided to get a simple piercing, one on the ear to start. I had my lobes pierced with a gun twice previously, and they hadn't done well at all [i know better than to go to a mall kiosk now]. A friend of mine had decided on a piercing for me: an anti-helix. It seemed simple enough, in an easy location, and less risky than other parts of the body. We didn't really have the money to go to a professional shop, so.. yes, we decided to make it a self-done job. Spare me the ranting, I've learned my lesson.
At A Glance Author jailbait Contact jailbait@bme.anon IAM jailbait When A month ago Artist Elizabeth Schneider I had ordered a 14g hollow-point needle from BMEshop about a week previously, and my friend Elizabeth had a 14g titanium CBR [missing the ball, of course] that we were going to insert into my ear. She had bought some EMLA cream from BMEshop as well, but I figured there was no point in using it on a cartilage piercing and decided to just move on with the process. We sat in her kitchen, me in a kitchen chair and her hovering over me with a very sharp needle.. I began having second thoughts about the whole process. Alas, she convinced me to just go on with it. After setting up the camera appropriately [my boyfriend being the cameraman] and "sterilizing" the jewelery in some scalding water, she told me to hold my breath and essentially stabbed a sharp implement through my ear. Unfortunately, things did not go as smooth as planned and it ended up taking four tries to get the needle to go through properly for her to get the jewelery in. Turns out, she had pierced it at a slight angle, and every time she went to put the earring in, she was attempting to make a completely different hole in my ear. Ugh.
Eventually, we got the earring in and all of the blood cleaned out of my ear [my entire ear was filled with blood to the point of blocking my hearing], and the piercing itself cleaned with a q-tip and some sea salt mixed with water. All three of us [me, Elizabeth, and my boyfriend/cameraman] ended up getting pierced that day, with one needle mind you, which just wasn't safe to begin with. Shows how stupid three teenagers with sharp implements can be when they have nothing better to do.
We did have a video of the experience [complete with the confusion from me at the fact that my hearing in my right ear was beginning to go out, and me wondering why the needle went through my ear four times even though I KNOW it only takes one pass to make a hole], unfortunately, it accidentally got deleted when some other videos were being deleted, so I have no entertainment to submit.
I expected some initial swelling and pain, as with any piercing, but I wasn't prepared for exactly how much pain I got. For the next three weeks or so, I couldn't sleep on the side of my head the piercing was on, couldn't rotate the ring at all because of the amount of crust that was forming on the ring [despite my thrice daily H2Ocean and Bactine cleaning, too], and it bled, A LOT. More than it should have, at any rate. I finally figured out that if it wasn't going to heal properly then, it probably wasn't going to heal properly in the future. It was just pussing too much, and not getting any better. After one particularly painful, bloody night, I just took the earring I had in out, which almost immediately [within two days] brought the swelling down, and a few weeks later, the scar tissue has significantly reduced. I do plan on getting it re-pierced in the future, after I give it more time to heal and shrink back to its original size.
Since then, I've gotten piercings from professionals, and they haven't had nearly as an adverse reaction as the self-done one. So I'm guessing, and I'm probably right, that the infection as well as the keloiding was caused by something we did wrong, yanno.. not autoclaving anything, improper sterilization, trying to cook and pierce at the same time.. all just bad ideas. From now on, I think I'm sticking to the clean, professional piercing studios, and staying out of my friend's kitchen. Unless she's cooking.