At A Glance
Author	Lennox
Contact	Lennox@bme.anon
When	Three months ago
Artist	Dominick
Studio	Starlight Tattoo
Location	Belleville, NJ

Getting Pierced

I have always been curious about piercings and tattoos. My parents, as accepting as they have been during my seventeen years of "being me" as they like to put it, are extremely conservative when it comes to their viewpoints on body modifications. And that viewpoint is a big fat "NO WAY." I had to beg for a solid six years before they even let me get my ears pierced. So convincing them to let me get my navel pierced, which I figure is the next most common and typical piercing on a teenage girl, was even trickier. But after some more begging and promising to achieve a few good grades, and printing out extensive information for my father to read, they agreed to it. I was psyched, I even knew exactly where I was going to go and get it done.

I have to go backwards here for a moment to include some necessary information that I think, in part, screwed up the healing process on my piercing. In August of last year, I had let my boyfriend give me an inverse navel piercing one afternoon (yes, it was a stupid idea but thankfully neither party came out harmed by the experience) and I fell in love with it. I took it out after all of three or four hours because we didn't have the correct jewelry, and I obviously did not want it to reject. Of course, it healed super quickly. I left a band-aid on it overnight and some neosporin just to be careful and I was fine. The teeny tiny scars were only visible if anyone knew to look for them, which they didn't.

Eight months later I found myself with my boyfriend and parents in Starlight Tattoo in Belleville, New Jersey on a nice afternoon in April to let Dominick stick a needle through the flesh under my bellybutton. There were a few butterflies floating around in my stomach but overall I felt pretty good about it. I've always had a high tolerance for pain and needles so I wasn't worried about that, it was more an anxious feeling of just wanting to get it done and over with. My parents looked through the book of photos of piercings that Dominick had done. I think it definitely helped ease their thoughts a little bit to see other work of his.

I had previously seen him do a nape piercing on somebody, and it was extremely reassuring to see how precise he was about it. He was very picky about the placement, which I think is a very good thing when it comes to getting pierced.. he made sure that the owner of said nape was happy with it and he had the other two of us standing in the room look at it and tell him if we thought it was alright too. He's very clean and professional and great with answering questions and I would definitely recommend him to anyone looking for a piercer.

My dad had a few questions for him once we got back into the piercing area (my mom & boyfriend waited outside because there wasn't enough room for more people and my mom gets queasy at the mention of needles) and he answered them as he was making the marks on my tummy. He had me check them out in the full length mirror. I gave him the OK and he sprayed the chair in the room with some sort of disinfectant, I assume, and had me lie down on my back. Then he asked what colour gem I wanted on my jewelry- a curved barbell- and I asked for red. I actually wound up with purple because he was out of red at the time, but purple seemed like a good choice too.

So he got everything ready, and disinfected the area where the piercing was going, and put on the clamp and everything. He had me look up at the ceiling and take a breath in, and apparently that is when he put the needle through. Honestly? I didn't feel it. I have heard people say that it was very painful for them, but at the most all I felt was a little bit of pressure. He slipped the jewelry in and had me check it out again in the mirror. I loved it. The placement was absolutely perfect. He cleaned it up a little bit and put a piece of gauze over my bellybutton. The entire time he wore gloves. We paid and tipped him and got our sheet on aftercare and left to go buy some Epsom's salt at the drugstore down the street.

The Healing Process

(Some of this some people might find a little bit gross, nothing very terrible, but I have told friends about this and it's made them feel a bit queasy so I thought I'd include a fair warning. I just thought it might be helpful to include what happened to me and with the infection I got from not taking proper care of my piercing so others might not make the same mistake!)

My piercing has since healed but it was not an easy process for me. It barely bled at all from what I can remember. For about a month I was very diligent about caring for it and keeping it clean, and remembering not to touch it with dirty hands. I gave it a nice little sea salt soak at least once a day and used Dial antibacterial soap on it in the shower. Towards the end of the one month mark though, I started getting lazy and irresponsible with it. I would find myself absent-mindedly playing with it in class with my grubby hands. I learned the hard way that high waisted pants and fresh navel piercings are a no-no (it got pretty irritated after I did that). My little piercing was feeling pretty crappy towards the end of May. The skin around it was strangely firm, and when pressed it would ooze a liquidy pus that was creamy in colour and basically, just plain gross. On one occasion I remember unscrewing the bottom ball and pulling the barbell back to try and let some of the pus out and it just oozed the stuff in this big glob. I know it's disgusting, but I'm trying to illustrate how important it is to properly care for these things. I was very determined to keep it though, and I even wound up in the nurse's office daily between classes to clean it off with some Dial and a little bit of a salt soak. For awhile this remedy seemed to be working and my piercing was feeling much better and oozing a lot less. So I eased up on the Dial/soaking treatment and everything seemed fine.. for a little while.

Remember that old inverse navel piercing I told you about? The one I let my boyfriend do, that I removed after a few mere hours and it healed up leaving nothing but two tiny scars only visible to someone who was looking for them? I went swimming in a very chlorinated pool about three months after the new piercing was done, In July. I don't think this was a very smart move on my part, because I think I was supposed to wait longer than that months to do this and because I have pretty sensitive skin to begin with. After the swim I cleaned the piercing with some Dial and figured it would be OK. I don't know if this has anything to do with what happened next but I thought I'd include it because new problems arose the morning after. I woke up and noticed a tiny pimple right over where the first piercing's exit hole had been (it had been freehanded, so it was a little crooked and the exit hole of the first piercing was slightly left of where the second professional one was done). The entrance and exit to the piercing were also a little bit red, but I didn't think very much of it because I had gone swimming. Later on though, I noticed that the strange firmness/pressure around the piercing again, and this time around the little pimple. I did a couple of soaks but the oozing from the piercing this time wasn't as bad as it had been previously. A day or two later the pimple was a hard little dot on my stomach, like a small red scab. I have this small bad habit of picking at all my scabs, and so without thinking I ripped this one off while sitting in bed one night and what do you know, a little bit of that same gross ooze, mixed with some blood. Not a pleasant sight.

I'm not 100% sure on what happened so that the icky pus coming out of my piercing was now coming out of the scar over where the first one was. If anyone has any insight into this I'm very curious to know. Since the little pimple like scab thing wasn't healing up on it's own, I doused it with a small dab of Neosporin and left a band-aid on it for awhile. I became diligent again about the salt soaks on my navel and the Dial and everything and things healed up beautifully. My navel feels fine now and it has been infection free for the past month and a half. I haven't done the salt soaks in almost as long as that, about a month or so. I've been swimming since and it has not become irritated, but I made sure to clean it with the antibacterial soap and gave it a salt bath that night, just in case.

I think it's a great piercing and I still love how it looks. Would I go through the gross infection and healing process again? Absolutely. My advice to anyone getting a new piercing is to remember that your body is going to look at it as a wound, and if you don't give it the full care and attention that it needs, your body probably won't be very happy with that!