| At A Glance | |
| Author | kimberly |
| Contact | kimberly@bme.anon |
| When | Three months ago |
| Artist | Dr. Cori Agarwal |
| Studio | University of Utah, Division of Plastic Surgery |
| Location | Salt Lake City, UT |
Left to Right: 5/8" lobes, 2 months of shrinking, 2 days after surgery, 1 month after surgery.
In March of 2002, on my sixteenth birthday, I began the process of stretching my ears. I'm not going to go into details, since I'm sure you've heard the stories hundreds of times. I only wanted 8 gauge, but I got sucked in and kept stretching bigger and bigger. I mostly stretched because I would buy jewelry that was bigger than my holes, and I needed to fit it. I never went to a professional studio. In fact, my mom pierced my ears at home for the first time when I was eight years old, and I did a lot of stretching by wrapping electrical tape around existing plugs (I know, not a great idea, see your piercer before doing anything stupid). After a little more than a year of stretching, the holes in my ear lobes were 5/8".
I loved my stretched lobes. At first, my favorite part was all the different jewelry I could wear. I loved organic plugs and sparkling amber jewelry. After the novelty of finding new and exotic jewelry wore off, I wore my favorite pair of bamboo plugs for about three years straight. Those plugs just became a part of who I was. I was living in California at the time. I was a full time student and full time pizza delivery driver, girls with plugs wasn't out of the ordinary, and my plugs had no impact on my life.
When I was 19, I met the man I would end up marrying. He lived almost 800 miles away from me, and our relationship was strictly a friendship for the first few years. In 2007, I made the move to Utah to spend the rest of my life with him. I decided this was a new chapter of my life. My decision meant that I was going to grow up and get a career and buy a house and move forward with my life. I was done delivering pizza and making people's food. I didn't want the first thing the new people in my life would notice about me to be the gigantic holes in my ears.
I started to become really self-conscious about them. I got engaged in January and we set our wedding date for August 8th 2008. A week later, I made the decision to find a plastic surgeon that could reconstruct my ear lobes. Before I did anything drastic, I wanted to see how far the holes would shrink on their own. This might sound vein, but I really wanted to be able to wear "normal" dangling earrings at my wedding.
I had done a lot of research. First I wanted to find it there was an alternative to surgery if I couldn't get my ears to shrink all the way on there own. I didn't find any helpful information. All I found were a few people here who had the reconstructive surgery done with amazing results! At this point, I started looking into plastic surgeons.
During this time period, I took out my plugs, just to experiment and see how well they would shrink. I knew the shrinking process had a lot to do with how carefully your ears were stretched in the first place. I let them shrink for about 10 weeks and one of them closed to about a 2 gauge, and the other one about a 4 gauge (these are estimations, as I never put jewelry in them or had them measured).
I called a few cosmetic surgeons in the area and got quotes that ranged from $500 to $800 for the pair. The University of Utah, department of plastic surgery, gave me the lowest quote. I went for a consultation with them, where they told me the operation would consist of cutting away the scar tissue with a scalpel and then stitching the freshly cut skin together. It seemed simple enough and they scheduled my surgery for later that week.
The surgery was painless (except for the shots of Lidocaine they gave me to numb my ears). It only took about 40 minutes and I was awake the whole time. I felt fine after the procedure and went to a basketball game later that night. My ears were sore for the next few days and they bled some. The stitches came out on their own and I never had to go back to see the hospital. My ears healed up very quickly. I massaged them everyday to help get rid of as much scar tissue that I could, and I was left with a faint white scar on each ear.
After everything was said and done, it cost me $452 dollars. I was warned that insurance companies rarely would pay for a cosmetic surgery like this, so I didn't even bother with giving my insurance information. As far as money goes, I feel like I got a great deal. Especially since I was quoted more than the procedure ended up costing me.
It's been three months since my surgery and I just got my ears re-pierced at the blue boutique in Sugarhouse, Utah. My piercer told me that he knew some piercers in the area that were not surgeons that were experimenting with closing stretched lobes. I would have liked to look into them before I had my surgery done. I'm always looking to save a penny. Although, I am glad I went to an MD. I am very happy with my results and would recommend lobe surgery to anyone thinking about going that route!