After reading people's accounts of their piercing's on BME for the past couple of months, and also reading the articles about what not to do when getting a tattoo/piercing, I'd thought I'd add a cautionary tale of my first piercing, which I'm afraid to say I did myself, in order to keep people from making the same mistakes I did when they came to get their first piercing. And while it may seem hypocritical of me to lay down a "do as I say, not as I do" type of account, I believe it is only by learning about the mistakes other people have made that we learn not to make them ourselves.
At A Glance Author Valey Contact Valey@bme.anon When Two years ago Let's rewind for a moment to June 2005. At that time I was studying for my end of year exams at school and was considering getting a piercing. By "considering" though, I really mean that I was sitting around in school one day and almost jokingly mentioned that I'd like to get my nipple pierced: this was followed by a big laugh from everyone around and no-one really took me seriously.
At this period in time I only knew about shops which pierced ears and tattooists I didn't realise that I could have gone to a specialist piercer for this, as if I had known I would definitely have gone to one of them and not ended up doing what I did in the end: that is take a safety pin and stick it through my nipple!
But that's exactly what I ended up doing. I was sitting around in my room one day in June with the late evening sunlight streaming in my window day-dreaming about a friend who had pierced his ear himself with a safety pin and suddenly decided I could do the same myself: only instead of to my ear, I'd do it to my nipple. This seemed like a good idea at the time and so without any further ado, I got some ice and a safety-pin, held the ice on my nipple until it was numb and then finally pushed the needle through (which took a while due to it being a relatively blunt needle). I then simply left the safety-pin in and went down to dinner, wondering at how crazy I must have just been to do that to myself, and the next day put some tape over my nipple (with the safety-pin in) and carried on as normal with my life.
A couple of days later, I went back to training (I was a UK national rower until I grew to old for the junior squad and found everyone in the senior squads were faster, heavier and about 6 inches taller than me so gave it up) and, as I wasn't prepared to show people the depths that my self-mutilation (as I thought of it then) had sunk to, I simply took the pin out and left it out for a couple of days.
Not realising the risks of what I had done, I put a different pin in after a couple of days and simply thought it would all be alright: what I failed to think of, as a young and naive 17 year old, was that this pin was rusty and I had just pushed it through what was essentially an open wound in my chest. After about 3 days though (about a week from the original piercing) my nipple started seeping pus at all days of the day and night, and I panicked. Instead of going to a doctor about this infected wound seeping from my chest, afraid that he would think me crazy for sticking a pin through my nipple and have me committed or something, I decided to simply stick a plaster over it and hope it would heal up by itself.
Unfortunately, I had failed to consider that an infection doesn't just go away by itself without causing some harm to the body it's infected: by not considering that I ran the risk of permanent scarring to my nipple and surrounding tissue and even a severe infection to my body which could have led to septicaemia and even death!
Luckily, however, this story has a happy ending: after sponging pus off my nipple every day for a couple of months and finding a nice gold bar in a shop to keep in my nipple permanently, I ended up with a fantastic piece of body jewellery and a ink into the world of body modification which I wouldn't trade for anything. I was seriously lucky, however, in the way that there was n permanent damage to me or my nipple (except for a hole in it) from my self-piercing experience. Let me stress that what I did was reckless and stupid, and that if I had thought about it I would have gone to a professional to pierce me, as I have with all my subsequent piercing's, although of all of them: I love my nipple bar the best: simply for the amount of people freaked out when I finally came up with the courage to show it to people, a mere six months after the event: and the equally shocked expressions I get when I tell them I did it myself! At the end of the day a great experience, but one I would only go through again with the help of a professional and without the huge amount of pus.