At A Glance
Author	anonymous
Contact	anonymous@bme.anon
When	Two years ago
Artist	Chris
Studio	Divine
Location	Edmonton, AB, CA

Christmas 2004:

My youngest sister was down visiting me for Christmas and after much discussion, we decided to pay for the other to get pierced as a Christmas gift. I hadn't gotten a new piercing in a while, so I was very excited about the possibility of some new metal.

She had almost instantly decided on her navel (her very first piercing other than her ears) and after some searching, I chose my tragus. I had wanted to get my tragus pierced for some time, but lack of funds had prevented me from doing so. I also wanted to get an industrial, but previous experiences with cartilage piercings and scarring made me rather hesitant to attempt something that could have so many potential healing problems.
The only remaining questions were where we would go to get pierced and when.
Having been in the shop a few times and having talked to people who had gotten work done there, Divine seemed to be a wise choice in term of technical ability and general atmosphere. A phone call was made and appointments were set up for that weekend.

The big day arrives and both my sister and I are really excited. We head to Divine for our appointments after eating lunch and after filling out consent forms ensuring that we were healthy enough to get a piercing and we selected our jewelery (a curved barbell with jeweled ends for her and a 16ga CBR for me). We were then ushered into the back room to meet Chris, our piercer.
Having had several more piercings than my sister, I decided to let her go first in the vent that she was nervous (I rather enjoy watching too). She hopped up on the bench, Chris scrubs up, puts on gloves and marks her navel. She liked the placement and Chris proceeds change gloves, open up his tools, clamp her navel and pierce (all while frequently changing gloves). A quick look in the mirror and little sis is happy. My turn.

I hop up on the bench, Chris again changes gloves, gets his tools out, marks my ear and bends the needle. He tells me to take a few deep breaths in and out and that he's going to pierce me on the count of three. He counts to 1, I take a deep breath in through my mouth and let it out through my nose as he counts to 2. He counts to three and while taking another breath in through my mouth, I feel the needle pierce my ear. There was a sharp stinging sensation for a split second as the needle went through the cartilage accompanied by some lovely almost crunching noises as the needle went through. All in all, it was relatively painless and over very quickly. Chris replaced the needle with the ring in one fluid motion and clip the bead in.
The ring looked awesome and after getting some aftercare instructions, we paid (with a tip, of course), got our aftercare supplies and headed home.

For the first few weeks, the healing was pretty uneventful. I soaked my piercing in hot salt water twice a day and just generally made sure to keep it clean, keep my hands off of it and not play with it at all. It seemed like my healing was going fine, which was a blessing as I've had big problems with scarring and cartilage piercings in the past.
Then, I noticed the beginnings of some hypertrophic scarring. Over the next few weeks, it started getting worse and worse. The bump forming on front hole of the piercing continued to larger and redder every day. I babied my piercing and made sure to do an additional soak every day to settle it down as well as being very careful that I wasn't letting shampoo and conditioner irritate it when I showered. That didn't really seem to be doing much good, so I started brewing a cup of chamomile tea and using the tea bag as a hot compress on my ear three times a day for fifteen minutes. After a few weeks of diligence, the scarring began to settle down and over time it's diminished completely. Looking at my piercing you would never have been able to guess that it had been such a mess a few weeks before.

My tragus is still doing lovely over two years later and I'm still very happy with it. The only problem is that I recently acquired some very nice 12ga 5/16" rings that would be perfect in a tragus. I plan to get my other tragus dermal punched at 12ga, but I'm unsure of what I'm going to do with this one. I am very tempted to stretch it, gradually, to 12ga, but it would likely be easier and more humane to let it close up and get it dermal punched at 12ga too.