At A Glance Author Cat Contact Cat@bme.anon When It just happened Artist Piercing done by Raphaelle/Removal by Pascal Studio Magic Circus /Pascal's Body Art Location Paris/Annemasse (FR) I've had 10 mods done (one retired), monroe, labret, both cheeks (dimples), stretched my ears a fair bit, and have three horizontal cleavage bars. I've had the cheeks since May and a part from a teeny little ball of flesh on my inner left cheek I'd never had a problem with ANY of my mods.
I was out visiting friends in the French Alps these past 4 days.
On Sunday evening, my left cheek piercing started to hurt. I disinfected it and thought nothing of it. A little later during the night I sensed there was a problem because I could actually feel my cheek throbbing. I tried to take the piercing out but the swelling had already gotten to a point where I couldn't even grasp either end firmly. I could feel skin all around the flatback, and I had to push on the bead to even feel the flatback. I desinfected as best as I could but it didn't really help, I'm afraid. It was around 7 pm when it first started to hurt, 2 am when it really got bad (it was preventing me from sleeping!), I was stuck in the middle of the mountains, the nearest piercing parlor was near Geneva. So I had to wait until Monday. If I had been in Paris, I could have called up my piercer on her cell and asked to see her, but the case was that I could not and this was a problem for me. I finally managed to fall asleep around 6, my cheek was steadily getting bigger an d bigger, and with the pressure applied to it by the piercing stud, I was in more and more pain.
Well, when I woke up on Monday morning, my cheek had swollen up about four times bigger than it had been the night before. It was so painful I couldn't even speak. To top it off, I couldn't even feel the flatback to my jewelery because the skin had swollen on top of the piercing. I couln't understand HOW it could have gotten so bad in such a short time span. I went to the bathroom and took out a compress, pressed on to the inside of my cheek and tried to feel for the jewelery. No such luck. I took the compress and pressed down bead side. I felt pain, blood in my mouth, but no sign of the jewelery peaking out its head on the inside of my cheek. I knew it was going to be tough to take it out, but I knew that I needed to get it done fast.
I got to the nearest piercer as quickly as I could. When I showed him, he guessed it was an inner infection seeing as there was no trace of infection around the puncture, only the big massive pus pocket that now inhabits my left cheek. He asked if I had done any amphetamines, because I might have just chewed my cheek to death. The answer was of course no, but I told him I had already had a problem with this piercing as while it was healing a little ball of flesh had formed at the base on the inside. He assumed that the infection could have been linked to this, that the inside of my piercing had somehow gotten something stuck in it, that the infection started with the flesh ball and then degenerated. It made perfect sense to me seeing as the side that had started to engulf my piercing was the side with said flesh ball.
Anyway, the removal was quite delicate as what I had was no longer a piercing but an implant. The piercer looked at my cheek, and said, "You look tough enough to handle this, but I can't say this is going to be painless and quick".
He took a pair of pliers to snap off the bead, which was the easy part. When he snapped off the bead, a stream of blood and pus spurt out of the hole (and on to his clean white t shirt, yuck). He tried with clamps first to see if the skin was still open over the piercing. It wasn't. He tried to scrape off some of the skin but realized that the stud was embedded pretty deep into my cheek, maybe a centimetre thick. So he took what appeared to be an 8 or 10 guage needle and pushed on the remaining bit of the jewelery post from the outside of my cheek (therefore pushing in).
I'm used to pain, but this was unbearable. It took about 5 minutes for him to push the goddamn thing out, flatback first. I felt it scraping through my cheek and my megs were twitching from the pain. Once he'd managed to disloge it I felt a pressure release my cheek (which doubled size again) and the pain stopped. Actually, once he stopped pushing, it all went numb.
So I'm down to 8 piercings and have a circular abcess about 4 cm in diametre in my left cheek, and am in dire need of a doctor to get rid of it.
I never thought that an infection could get so bad in 12 hours time.