When I last left off I was one month in and everything was doing great. (My first experience can be found here.) Over the course of the next month I continued to do the sea salt soaks and gradually weaned myself of them and started a new routine of standard cleaning in the shower like I do with all my other piercings. The amount of lymph was significantly decreasing and by the end of the second month it had practically disappeared.
At A Glance Author Uberkitty Contact Uberkitty@bme.anon IAM Uberkitty When N/A I was happy. I'd just finished healing a new genital piercing that was tentatively the start of a project. I was already looking forward to the day I could add additional rings to the one lonely one I had. But it would never come.
I was doing some normal cleaning in the shower (remember even healed piercings need cleaning or they develop the dreaded funk) and I noticed that the edge of the inner hole was surrounded by a halo of red. Just a side note: The outer hole did a very small amount of migrating during the first month but in the end it settled down and found a spot it was happy to stay in. No problem. The inner hole had never given me any problems until that moment.
When I finished my shower I dried off and brought out a hand mirror for a closer inspection. It looked like it had been slightly torn (downward, just millimeter or two) and that small wound had brought on the beginnings off rejection. You see I'm a very active person. I decide to randomly run places, I take two stairs at a time, and I jump walls and fences whenever I have the chance. And while I eased up a bit during to first month of healing to give it a better chance by month three I was defiantly back to my old habits in full force, including sexually (read: rough sex.) Even though it was pierced at 10 gauge and set in a place where it really didn't twist at all the fact that it tore really doesn't surprise me.
Devastated is really too strong a word but I did nearly cry. I tried to think of something to do. You can never win against rejection, once it starts nothing can stop it and I knew going into this that outer labia piercings are prone to several different problems. Those were risks I accepted and I'd promised myself that if any signs of rejection started to show that I would take it out that very moment to minimize the inevitable scar tissue instead of clinging to it far too long as I've seen too many others do.
At first I planed to go to my piercer to confirm it but after waiting several hours I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It was the middle of the night and I was losing sleep over it. I already knew it was rejecting and felt that going to a pro would just be a way of delaying. I unscrewed one of the balls from the circular barbell, reconsidered one finial time, and took it out.
Now you can't really see the exit holes but you can tell something is not normal. The internal scar tissue is very easy to feel, it's like I have two hard beads inside me, this is remarkably different from the way my always unpierced labia feels (which is still soft, and squishy all over.) It also outright appears different. When the ring was in it would keep my labia pinched together, even when my legs are spread. Well, it turns out that the fistula does the same thing except now there is no "explanation" for it. It looks like it's always being pinched together by something invisible which is very bizarre and not aesthetically pleasing.
I started doing Vitamin E oil rubs to reduce the scaring but given the large internal distance that was pierced I doubt it will be able to penetrate deep enough to solve either of these problems in any meaningful way. I'm lucky that this happened three months after the initial piercing because the scar tissue is not yet mature and so it should in theory heal much closer to normal flesh than fully formed scar tissue, but I'll sill have to wait a full year to see how much the vitamin E and natural healing reduces it.
To anyone out there considering any modifications: Please be sure you know the risks well and furthermore accept them, then no matter what happens you are prepared to deal with it. I believe this has overall still been a positive experience for me and I wouldn't do anything different. I've had to adjust my plans for new mods and will more than likely live with some scaring but trying and failing has still been far more rewarding for me then if I had just put my desire for outer labia piercings out of my mind and done nothing.