At A Glance
Author	Angela Smith
Contact	Angela Smith@bme.anon
IAM	angela-la-la
When	N/A
Artist	various
Studio	Infinite Body Piercing / Body Work Productions
Location	Philadelphia, PA / Cleveland, OH

PIERCERS:
Kristin Hill (formerly of Infinite Body Piercing)
Sky Renfro
David Vidra, Body Work Productions, Cleveland
Jon Weir, Infinite Body Piercing, Philadelphia

BACKGROUND:
When I was a child, I had one fear worse than any other: that I would grow up to have breasts as big and (to my eyes) unattractive as my mother and sister did. Fate being what it is, by the time I was 18, my chest was actually quite a bit bigger than any of my female relatives' were. I hated them. I tried unsuccessfully to make peace with my body the way it was. I tried to buy pretty bras (difficult when you wear a DDD-cup); I tried to objectify them the way my adoring boyfriend did. It never worked. I saw my breasts as being almost alien to my body. I dressed to disguise them as best I could, I tried not to look at them or touch them unless I had to. They had very little sexual sensitivity. Because of my intense dissatisfaction with my breasts, they often bore the brunt of my forays into self-mutilation. When I was angry or upset, I would cut the tops of my breasts, usually in a random, slashing manner. In addition to the fact that I hated my breasts, I found the cuts easy to hide under clothing and the skin itself was not particularly sensitive. If I couldn't live with them the way they were, I wanted them to be gone.

SURGERY:
At that time, my nipples were not very well suited to being pierced. I had very large, drooping breasts, and as a result, the skin of my aureola were stretched and flattened from the weight. I decided to get a breast reduction because I was so unhappy with my chest. In case you aren't familiar with breast reduction surgery (reductive mammoplasty), the surgeon makes a circular incision around the aureola, two straight down from the aureola to the crease under the breast, and one which follows the crease from armpit to cleavage. Tissue is removed from inside the breast and what remains is reshaped. The surgeon makes a new place for the nipple higher up on the breast, which is then sewn into place. Sometimes the nipple is removed entirely to accomplish this; sometimes it remains attached by an underlying flap of tissue and blood vessels called a pedicle. I had the pedicle type of surgery, which is supposed to help retain better blood flow and sensation. The surgeon then removes a wedge of the excess skin and sews the breast back together. I ultimately had about 40" (forty linear inches) of sutures total – around my entire aureola, down to the breast crease, and following the entire crease underneath each one.

Doctors are usually complicit in getting breast reduction patients what they want. The surgeon I ultimately picked told me that his office "knew how to fill in the forms" so that the insurance company would accept the claim. They accepted my reasons of back pain and dermatitis (I had a bad chronic rash between and underneath my breasts from the pressure of the bra and the skin being folded). Both those problems did exist. If I had loved my breasts, I don't think that would have been enough to make me go ahead with the surgery. In all truth, I used the insurance company's willingness to pay as a way of getting an expensive elective body modification. I had a hard time telling people about the non-medical reasons for my reduction for a long time. I was reluctant to admit that I'd gone under the knife for "non-medical" reasons. It wasn't until years later, when I became close to several transsexual people, that I fully accepted that my decision was based almost entirely on psychological reasons, and that it was acceptable for me to reshape my body how I saw fit. With two unfortunate exceptions, I haven't self-cut since I had my breast surgery. Partly this is due to my getting older and being less prone to self-injury, but I can attribute a lot of it to the fact that I like my breasts now and no longer feel the intense dysphoria about them that I did.

PIERCING:
I had my nipples pierced for the first time about a year and a half after my surgery. My scars were mostly flattened out and white. My nipples were still fairly flat, although having the weight of the breast reduced helped them develop somewhat. The obstacles to piercing, however, were numerous. The nipples aren't a completely regular shape. They are slightly oval, and when they get hard, the shape in cross-section is more like a sloping cone than a square little jujube. The main issue with which I was concerned was that the ring of scar tissue around my aureola was pretty prominent. This wasn't so much of an issue when my nipples were hard, but when they weren't, the scar tissue stuck out further than the aureola itself - similar to what a rubber band looks like laying on a table. This would mean that the bars would have to be very short and small so as not to get pushed out by this ring of scarring. The first time I had them pierced, Kristin at Infinite did the piercing with titanium barbells that had very small balls (12g barbells, 11/16" long, with 5/32" balls). The piercing itself was somewhat intense, not the easiest one I've ever had but not the most painful by far. It was more of a hot, burning sensation than a sharp pain. I really babied the first set of piercings. I cleaned them with Satin antimicrobial soap, I soaked them in warm saline every other day, and I wore seamless bras so as not to irritate them. Despite my best efforts, they still rejected. One of them (the flatter right nipple) only took about four months before the blue titanium started to show through the skin. The other nipple didn't move quite as much, but I still decided to take it out a month later in the interest of symmetry.

The second set of piercings were done in Cleveland at Body Work Productions, about six months after I took the first pair out. I had these performed tandem (that is, at the same time) by Dave Vidra and Sky Renfro (who was in Cleveland teaching a course at that time). This time I chose to get them done vertically in the hopes that there would be less pressure on them and they might heal better. I used the same barbells – 12g titanium with 5/32" balls; the length may have been different. The piercing itself went wonderfully. Both piercers had an amazing bedside manner, and it was definitely an honor to have two people with so much experience work on me. I enjoyed the tandem piercing, too. It was good to avoid the dreaded anticipation of the second piercing and split the difference in pain.

MASTITIS:
About two weeks after I got these piercings, I made an incredibly stupid mistake and let someone I was having sex with get saliva on the fresh piercings. Unfortunately, knowing something is a bad idea doesn't always mean I do what I'm supposed to. Sure enough, about a week later I came down with an infection. It started out as just an increase in sensitivity, which I thought was a sign that the piercings were healing. I was disabused of this notion a day or two later when they started to produce larger than normal amounts of crust, which was dark yellow (as opposed to whitish, which I normally have in a healing piercing). I immediately began treating the infection with hot saline soaks and cleaning the piercings with Technicare in a desperate attempt to flush out the bacteria. Unfortunately, the infection got progressively worse. Over the course of the next few days my nipples became excruciatingly painful to touch, the skin was hot and red, and they produced so much yellowish green pus that I had to wear sterile gauze in my bra to stop it from leaking through my shirt. My left breast began to swell and get slightly hard around the nipple area. I tried to get an appointment with my gynecologist, but they told me to go to the emergency room because she couldn't fit me in for weeks. I called up my regular doctor, and he gave me an appointment for Monday morning (it was then Friday morning). A co-worker gave me some colloidal silver to try to treat my infection, but it didn't seem to have an impact (later I learned that colloidal silver can cause a permanent skin staining called argyria). By the following morning, I could feel a hard lump beneath the skin to one side of my left aureola, which grew over the course of Saturday to be just a little smaller than a tennis ball, maybe 2 or 2 1/2" in diameter. You could easily see the swelling when I was topless. At this point, most people would probably have gone to an emergency room, but I was anxious to see my piercing-friendly doctor rather than a strange r in the ER. When I got home from work that night, running a fever and exhausted from the infection, I decided to lance the hard spot (I knew that was the usual treatment for mastitis, which is an infection of the milk duct, and I was pretty sure that was what I had developed). I cleaned the area thoroughly with Technicare and inserted an 18g needle into the fluid-filled pocket. Immediately, green, foul-smelling pus began to shoot from the end of the needle. There was so much pressure behind it, it continued to shoot outwards from the needle for five or ten seconds. I removed the needle and pus continued to stream from the infection and run down my chest.

Thus began one of the more horrible experiences of my life. It was 1 AM, no one was home for me to call, and I recognized the signs that I was about to pass out. I sat down on the bathroom floor. I gave up trying to soak up the pus with gauze when I was going through large pieces of it in under a minute, and I just used a bath towel. My breast continued to trickle pus in a steady stream for about twenty minutes. The hard lump went down in size considerably, but I could still feel it. I was light-headed, completely nauseated by the smell of the infection, and feverish. After about an hour, I managed a shower, wrapped up the hole and went to bed. When I woke up on Sunday morning, the pus had soaked through two pieces of gauze, my bra, and the shirt I was wearing. The hole that I had used to drain it remained open, probably because of the huge amount of bacteria in it, and continued to drain all throughout the day. I was forced to change the dressings over it every ho ur, and I felt weak and shaky all day. That night, the lump was down to about the size of a ping-pong ball. I decided to lance in two additional spots in the hopes that I could drain more fluid from it. The two spots I lanced mainly drained blood and very little pus, so I gave up for the night and went to sleep.

The next day was my doctors appointment. I showed up in his office feeling a great deal of dread. I had told him the situation over the telephone, but he was still surprised at the awful state of my nipples. He told me that I'd probably done the right thing by lancing it (although he still thought I should have gone to the ER) and complimented me on my use of sterile needles. Because the hole was still open, he didn't need to lance it again, but he did use a sterilized probe to see how deep it went and help drain more fluid. Let me tell you, nothing reminds you of your own sorry state than a doctor sliding a wooden probe a couple of inches into the middle of your breast and swishing it around. It was really, really revolting. We debated back and forth on the topic of removing the piercings. I explained that I didn't want to, because leaving the channel open would allow the fluid to drain from the nipples themselves (the mastitis was only on the left side, but both ni pples had surface infections). He told me that he thought it would be a good idea to, but he conceded that it might mean further lancing. I told him that I would remove the piercings if he absolutely thought it was necessary, but he told me that it was ultimately up to me and if I wanted to leave them in I could.

He prescribed me strong antibiotics (Cipro, the kind they used for anthrax victims) and warned me that if they didn't work within a few days, the next step was hospitalization and IV antibiotics. I took the pills, and I also continued the very hot compresses four or five times a day. The infections did clear up. I was very lucky; I know that some people have suffered much worse scarring and even partial mastectomies from mastitic infections. I was left with a scab on my aureola and a circular scar. The walnut-sized hard lump of scar tissue eventually disappeared, but it did take several months. The piercings began to reject fairly rapidly after the infection. Of course, the infection happened when the piercings were very new, so it's impossible to say whether they would have rejected anyway. This time it was the left nipple which rejected first, not the right.

DERMAL PUNCHING:
At that time I swore I would never have my nipples pierced again. I now had four scars on each nipple plus the one from the mastitis. However, about two years later, I began to wonder if there wasn't some way I could make the piercings work after all. Kristin, my original piercer, had had one of her nipples dermal punched, and it healed remarkably well. At first, it sounded like a more extreme procedure than I really wanted to commit to. After doing some research, however, I found that nipples are actually fairly well suited to small-gauge punches. Because the nipple is made of dense muscular tissue (not erectile tissue as many people believe), in theory it should heal quickly when punched. I talked to Jon about it, and after several months of discussion and waiting, we decided to go ahead with it. I ordered custom glass rods from Ryan at Glasswear Studios (10g Pyrex, 7/8" long to accommodate o-rings). When they arrived, Jon did the piercings. I had been pumping my nipples semi-regularly with a snakebite kit to try and draw them out more and enhance their protrusion, and I hoped that that would help anchor the piercings better.

The first punch, through the less-scarred right nipple, actually hurt very little. Jon used a 12g punch and tapered the 10g jewelry in. It bled pretty profusely for a good ten minutes or more. The second punch, through the really scarred left nipple, was excruciating. It was difficult to push through and the taper hurt much worse than the other one. It bled very little in comparison to the right side. That night, the right side continued to bleed, soaking my shirt, sheets, and mattress. Both holes crusted really heavily for about three weeks and then, miraculously, they stopped completely. I never had any more crusties or discharge at all besides a small amount of jewelry crud like healed piercings produce.

These lasted much longer than the prior attempts, but unfortunately, they eventually started to shift as well. The piercings felt great from about a week after onwards, and after four or five months, I could even take them out for an hour or two and put them back in easily (something none of my other nipple piercings ever did). The o-rings on the Pyrex bars were difficult to keep on, and the jewelry fell out in my sleep at least once a week. It became a ritual to wake up and search for the tiny little bars in my bed. Over time, however, the poor beleaguered left nipple just gave up. The outside hole began migrating outwards, while the inside hole actually shifted down. I took it out when it was about nine months old. The right nipple healed fine. It moved a little bit during the first two months, and then stopped and stabilized. It did fall out a lot though, and one morning I woke up, noticed it was gone, and realized I really didn't care. I didn't particularly lik e having only one nipple pierced, but I was stubbornly keeping it in to prove to all the naysayers (including my piercers) that I could heal it. So that one lasted a whole year, but it too was eventually lost.

So would I ever get my nipples pierced for a seventh and eighth time? Probably not, unless ten or fifteen years down the road I have a change of heart. It doesn't seem like the shape of my nipples is going to change enough to really ever allow happy, healed piercings, and the amount of scarring currently present is a big factor. I'm glad I had the experience of having them punched, and giving it one last try, but in a way I regret it too. Because of how often they've been pierced, and the internal scarring, my nipples have gone from being not sensitive to being somewhat unpleasant when stimulated. When I go outdoors in the winter now and my nipples harden, they ache really badly. I'm hoping that will go away over time, but it's pretty bad right now. I've come to accept that I won't ever have pierced nipples, and it's a little sad, but I'm okay with it. I still don't regret having my breast reduction for a minute, so ultimately the piercings aren't really that import ant. I'm still really envious of girls with perky, pencil-eraser nipples though. That was one thing the piercings failed to give me.