Extreme Body Mod, Plus a Piercing
At A Glance Author anonymous Contact anonymous@bme.anon When A week ago Artist Jim Studio Infinity Location Philadelphia It's not quite what you might think but in the past year I've undergone some extreme body modification, and picked up a piercing along the way. Let me begin by taking you back a year, when I found myself a bit on the north side of 40 years old, about a hundred pounds overweight, with health problems looming mostly because of all the excess weight. I decided I needed to do something about it, so I made myself a list of "rewards" I would give myself as incentives to continue the journey -- one reward for every 10 pounds lost. The early rewards were pretty simple, things like a new haircut, then a massage. I made the later rewards more substantial -- I think at some deep level I thought I'd never get to them so I could put down anything I fantasized about,, even something pretty wild. So, at 70 pounds it was a new car. At 90 pounds, an unspecified piercing, and at 100 a PA, which is something I'd been fantasizing about for a long while but "knew" I'd never have the guts to do.
So I started on the low-carb thing, and it worked for me. I soon settled into a pattern of losing about ten pounds a month, a rate which held for about seven months. (Got the new car.) Then things slowed down. It took another seven months to lose the next 20 pounds. All of a sudden it was time to face up to a "reward" I never really thought I'd achieve, a piercing.
I took some time to think about it, checked out some piercing on other guys, and decided that I'd go for a nipple. Also decided I liked the barbells better than the rings. Still, it took me a long time to ever go into a piercing shop. The first time I went in I got really weirded out by the guy behind the counter, he had stretched ears, something that looked like a button embedded below his lip, and a lot of ink over all the other visible parts of his body. So I checked out the jewelry, said I'd think about it, and left.
A couple of weeks later I was at home, and wondered if it was going to be very painful. So I got the biggest needle I could find, sterilized it and gave myself a test run. It didn't hurt very much, but it was kind of odd having a needle through my nipple. Took it out, wiser for the experience -- I knew it would be OK to have it done professionally.
Not too long after that I found myself in Philadelphia with a spare hour to kill between appointments. Without giving it too much thought, I went back to the same piercing store I'd been in earlier. This time, a guy named Jim greeted me, and other than a discreet ear ring and nostril ring, he looked pretty normal -- that is, if he'd had on a long sleeve shirt to cover the ink. I felt more comfortable with him from the get-go. He suggested that I could start with a 12 gage steel barbell, and I signed the papers, paid my money and within 10 minutes was in the chair.
Jim did a great job. He was careful about marking it to get it straight, and the actual piercing hurt a little but was no big deal (although this is being written by a guy who refuses Novocain at the dentist). Soon the barbell was in, no bleeding, and it looked great. Drove home without my shirt on so I could look at it better. It seems to be healing fine, aside from a little swelling and tenderness, but all in all much less pain than I expected from having a steel rod inserted in one of the most sensitive parts of my body.
So what's the extreme body mod? Well, I'm down 98 pounds, working out regularly, can actually see muscles which before were under layers of lard, feel great, went from a 44 inch to a 32 inch waist (which is darn good on a 6'2" man) and generally look hot enough to get checked out by a lot of the guys at the gym. It's not "extreme mod" like you'd find on other parts of this site, but when you think about it, losing one-third of your former self IS pretty extreme.
If you've been reading closely, you may have thought "that guy's only two pounds away from his PA reward." Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll lose the two pounds, but we'll have to see if I have the guts to go through with it. The piercing shop does have a "do five, get the sixth free" card -- so already I'm thinking about what the other four piercing might be...