| At A Glance | |
| Author | cuthalcoven |
| Contact | cuthalcoven@bme.anon |
| IAM | cuthalcoven |
| When | A month ago |
| Artist | Mom |
| Studio | Our house |
| Location | Toledo, OH |
Comtemplation followed. If I didn't like my weight or a 14ga...could I do something about it? I'm currently going through the process of getting approved for weight loss surgery, so I can't really speed that along any. Well then, what about a larger gauge piece of jewelry? That's it! I ordered a 10ga stainless steel internally threaded curved barbell, and a 10ga tri-beveled piercing needle from a piercing supplier online and waited impatiently.
When they came, I inspected them while they were still in the autoclaved baggies and noticed that the curved barbell seemed a bit bigger than the needle, but figured that it just looked that way because they were in bags and I couldn't accurately judge them. When the time came to pierce, I bleached the dining room table and laid paper towels over the whole surface. All my tools are pre-autoclaved, so I put gloves on and opened all the baggies, then got new gloves on to get the things like the surgical marker and alcohol wipes and everything out. I had the jewelry soaking in a sterilizing agent, which I rinsed off and disposed of before adding the jewelry to my little sanitary tray on the table.
My job was officially "done". I admit it, the 10ga needle was intimidating, so I hollered for my mommy. She grumbled a bit because I woke her up, (Keep in mind, it was 11pm and she'd been up since 5am. I didn't exactly plan this right, heh.) but proceeded to wash her hands and put on gloves to mark me up. Between mom and my sister, they realized that my navel is actually tear-shaped, and it doesn't line up with the midline of my trunk, it kind of turns to the side a bit at the top. Which, I guess, stupidly is kind of cute. At least I thought it was at the time! So we decided to go ahead and follow the midline down to mark, which would make the piercing itself look straight, and just make my body type look odd. (Like I'm not used to that anyways, huh?)
After another change of gloves, she grabbed the clamps and positioned them, and then started coming at me with the needle. I screamed, causing her to almost drop everything. I noticed...no lube! What the hell? That's a big ass needle tearing through flesh and she's so tired she didn't put any lubrication on it! So she dipped it in vaseline, and dipped it again after I complained that she needed to make it "slide through like butter". Mom, in her ever so loving way, told me to can it or she'd stab my eyeball. How nice.
Finally the needle was lubricated to my satisfaction, the clamps were in place, and we went through breathing exercises. Halfway through, she decides to stop and ask me if I'm sure I want to do this. "YES, I'm sure! Just pierce me!". We return to breathing, and on the third breath the needle slides through exactly as I'd wanted, like butter.
Then the trouble really starts. The jewelry, as I had noticed before, was a size larger than the needle itself. Generally, the NEEDLE should be larger, if there's a difference at all. The curved barbell would not go through, and it was beginning to hurt badly when mom kept trying to taper the hole to accept the larger gauge size. I finally ended up in tears and telling her just to put something 14ga in it to keep it open, and I would stretch it later, because it had started to bleed and I knew I needed to get jewelry in it before swelling started.
In desperation, we grabbed my sister's box of body jewelry and found a 14ga curved barbell with acrylic "watermelon" ball ends. It would do. Sadly, the top hole had started closing already, so I didn't even clean the jewelry at all, we just forced it in. (NOTE: DO NOT EVER DO THIS.) Since I knew it wasn't clean, I decided to quickly swab the area down with an alcohol swab and follow with another swab of peroxide. I mean it, I knew both of these things were bad for fresh piercings, but I also knew that chances were I'd get an infection from dirty jewelry if I didn't clean it. So to relieve some of the bad feeling, I went ahead and did a hot sea salt soak for an hour, which felt delicious.
The next day was painful, which I attributed to the feeling of a fresh piercing, since my stomach did tend to bend in odd places and the piercing was getting stretched and pulled a lot. By the 2nd day, I realized I had a problem on my hands. No matter how many sea salt soaks I did, it seemed like I had no crusties and no build-up, which struck me as odd. So I got a pair of gloves out and turned the jewelry up a bit. Oops. I found the crusties. Since the jewelry was shorter than the original bar I had chosen, the balls effectively sealed off the entrance and exit holes, trapping the pus inside. I squeezed out what I could while I had the gloves on, and then did a sea salt soak to try and alleviate the damage I had just done.
Every time I went to the bathroom for the next three days, I put on new gloves and repeated the ritual, soak and all. Even with all that time spent, I realized that red lines were starting to radiate from the original holes to about an inch away from the original wound site. Because my friend Rebekah is a verified link queen and self-professed wanna-be know it all, I immediately went to her for advice. We found out that it WAS in infection, but the thing about the red lines reaching your heart causing death was an urban legend. What a relief! Against my better judgement (yet again) I decided to take the jewelry out, and just keep squeezing it to get the extra pus out and keep the hole open, because it was starting to hurt to move or even to stand up at all.
My doctor is very mod-friendly, so when I called and described my dilemma, he ended up laughing at me. How fun, and it made me feel really blonde. He said he'd order a weeks prescription of an antibiotic, but that he wanted me to try something else for a week before picking it up. (This was him being nice, because he knew my insurance got canceled and I'd have a hell of a time affording antibiotics.)
My mom has had horrible ear infections all of her life. No medicines worked, and she kept digging and digging at the raw skin all the time until her ears bled. Finally, one of her doctors told her about a home remedy that had worked for him and his children all their lives. It was to take equal parts of alcohol and apple cider vinegar in a bottle, and use two or three drops up to three times a day. It worked wonders, and the woman with chronic ear infections hasn't had an infection since. He told me that since the mix prohibits "bad" cell growth and encourages "good" cell growth, he wanted me to try it and see if it would help on a piercing site, since it was now an open wound that wasn't going to be able to close all the way due to my cleaning and squeezing.
(I know all reviewers are cringing and screaming now, but honest, here's a link! I decided to give it a try, because if worse came to worse, I could just pick up the prescription. And, if it happened to work, well, then I'd saved money!
So for a week, I dutifully applied this mixture to my tummy. It burned, a lot. I remembered that it always got "hot" in my ear when we used it for infections, which meant that it was working...but for some reason I didn't think that would happen on open skin and outside of the ear canal. I guess I was wrong? The alcohol evaporated the moisture and helped keep the area bacteria-free, while the vinegar started some noticable new cell growth and the redness started going away. I was happy because the pain stopped almost immediately, besides the burning upon application.
It's now a month later, and the area has a small purple-ish scabby scar. It's ugly, but I plan to redo my navel once I either a) get ahold of proper jewelry again, or b) lose weight and go to my usual piercer.
Here's a picture of the original piercing,
And here's a picture of the infection as it was getting BETTER...so yes, it was even worse than this.
So what have I learned from this? (And hopefully, you have too!)
1- Always have extra autoclaved jewelry available. Even if you KNOW the jewelry is the same size, what do you do it you drop it or a ball goes down the sink? It always pays to have extra.
2- Never ever ever retire an infected piercing. It can trap the infection inside of you, and possibly cause serious sickness and maybe even death if not treated. The ONLY reason I did it is because the pain was so unbearable that my doctor recommended removing the irritant and treating the wound. I also made sure that I had the antibiotics ready should the wound not show improvement in a short week.
3- This home remedy is NOT for healing piercings! Do not ever use it on a fresh piercing in place of sea salt soaks or any other healing regime offered to you. This is a wound/infection treating wash, and meant to be used as so. It will irritate a fresh piercing, hurt you, and possibly do more harm than good for cleaning.
4- Never be so excited for a modification that you'll ignore the risks late at night just to get something new done. Enough said.
Listen kids, this is the TRUE DIY-experience. Most experiences I've read do NOT tell you this stuff! It's not as easy as you see in the studios. Those guys and girls are professionals and are taught how to do this stuff. You're not. Plain and simple, it's worth the money to go to someone who knows what they're doing. Reading stuff on BME (excluding osmosis, of course) does not make you a Piercer, and will not give you the knowledge to do everything yourself.