This is one of those unusual stories for BME. It's not about getting a piercing. It's about losing them. Two different apadravyas, pierced years apart, and both lost. Lost, but not without some undesirable side-effects that needed correcting.
At A Glance Author wlfdrgn Contact wlfdrgn@bme.anon IAM wlfdrgn When Six months ago Artist Self I got my first apadravya probably seven or eight years ago. It was done at 14-gauge which, of course, was too small, but no one had figured that out yet, really. The piercer did a good job with the piercing. Only a couple drops of blood. Healing was pretty uneventful and quite quick. About 18 months later, though, it started to grow out on the top hole. The round hole became a slit about four times longer than it was wide, and it showed no signs of stopping. It had to go. Luckily, the hole was small, especially the bottom hole, which never stretched at all, so there was no leakage. The hole itself, while grown closed at the urethra, is still quite prominent in the skin at the top.
Jump forward a few years. I've picked up some larger piercings, and come to the conclusion that the first apadravya had failed due to being too small. I got a new one, this time pierced at 8-gauge. It was initially pierced at 10-gauge, immediately tapered to 8-gauge, and the jewelry inserted. This time, there was quite a bit of blood, with the bleeding lasting for several days. Pain was a bit greater, too, but that's to be expected, and overall the healing went well.
For 18 months.
It was at an especially stressful time in my life, which I expect contributed to the problem. The piercing had been stretched to 6-gauge about six months before and that had long since settled in nicely. One day, though, there was suddenly a lot of leakage. There was nearly as much urine coming out of the top hole as the front. The hole had quickly stretched to probably around a 4-gauge or even a bit bigger. I think the stress probably caused it, but there was no sign of that going away any time soon. After a couple weeks without improvement, I finally decided that I had to take it out.
Past experience from my previous apadravya led me to believe that the leaking from these holes would be minimal. It wasn't. These holes were much larger, and they didn't close up on their own this time. A year after the jewelry came out, there was still a lot of leakage from both the top and bottom holes. I'd tried the "normal" methods of making these holes close up. Over-tapering. Intentional abuse. Cautery pen to brand it closed. I even scraped it up with both a play piercing needle and a scalpel blade until it was good and bloody, in hopes that the raw skin would close up. No luck. At least the leaks didn't get worse.
Then I started thinking about what it was that I really need to do. Dermabrasion would be the ideal solution. Removing a very thin layer of skin around the entire inner surface of the hole. The scalpel didn't do it. Neither did a play piercing needle I'd tried. So what would? It needed to be round. It needed to fit through the entire hole. It needed to be able to cut on the round sides, but not at the point. It needed to be able to expand into the hole to allow even pressure against the sides. Eventually I hit on the idea of a drill bit.
I bought a set of new steel drill bits, brought them home and soaked them for a while in hot, soapy water, hoping to get any oil or other coatings loosened up so I didn't put that into the fresh wounds I was expecting. Then, after washing in a lot of water, I finished the preparation by boiling for 15 minutes. Autoclaving would have been better, but I didn't have an autoclave available. They were new, so contamination by biological pathogens was pretty unlikely anyway.
Drill bits don't come in gauge, but I'll write this using the closest approximate gauges.
I started with the top hole, since it was the easiest to get to, and was also the source of the worst leakage. Initially, I tried an 8-gauge bit. By spinning it backwards, in the non-cutting direction, I found that it fit, but it was tight. I was surprised that, even after a year without jewelry, I'd had virtually no closing of the hole. It fit, but it was too tight for what I had in mind, so I took it out and worked a 10-gauge bit in the same way. Once in, I spun it backwards, twisting it quickly between thumb and forefinger, to get it moving, then I spun it forwards the same way. It spun forwards a revolution or two before catching on the skin. I couldn't pull it straight out, but I could turn it backwards again, which loosened it up again.
I repeated this procedure several times, spinning it forwards until it caught, then spinning it backwards to free it, then forwards again. After maybe a dozen repetitions, it was spinning forwards freely without catching, so I pulled it out to switch to a larger bit.
There was no blood on the bit. What there was, though, was a small amount of skin cells scraped from the inside of the hole. It was white and pasty in appearance.
I put the 8-gauge bit back in, which fit a bit easier this time, although I did still have to spin it backwards a bit to get it through. Following the same procedure with this one that I'd used with the 10-gauge bit, I continued to dermabrade the inner surface of the hole. When it spun forward freely, after around 15-20 tries, I removed it. The bit had much more of the pasty white stuff from the damaged skin cells on it. This time it was also tinted pink with just a touch of blood. Almost no bleeding from the hole, though. Just a bit of blood from the urethra. I think I may have gouged the inside of the urethra a bit with the drill bit. That's ok. Urethras heal up very fast.
I had no idea if this would work, and I'd never heard of anyone trying it before. I didn't know if I'd gone enough or if I should go up another size. I didn't know if it'd work at all. Given the uncertain results, I stopped after doing the top hole and held off on the bottom hole until I saw how the top hole healed up.
Later that day the hole got its first test. No leaks. I was happy to see that, but knew it could easily just be from swelling due to the recent irritation. After 8 days, though, without a single leak from the top hole, I was pretty sure I could declare it a success, so I repeated the procedure with the bottom hole. I had to start with a smaller bit this time, since the bottom hole had actually closed up a bit more on its own than the top hole did, and only went up to a 12-gauge bit on the bottom. The 12-gauge didn't fit initially, so I guessed this was big enough.
Later that day, no leaks, top or bottom. The urine stream was clean and uninterrupted for the first time in over two years. Finally, it looked like the holes were closed. That was six months ago now, and I've been leak-free all that time.
The only pain was when the bit, shoved through the bottom hole, while spinning, going through the urethra, hit the bottom of the top hole, which was still a bit too fresh to like the irritation. When the bit seized up while spinning, it was more of a pinching than pain. If I'd been spinning harder, though, I suspect that then it probably would have hurt a good deal more, but since it never really cut, but only gently scraped, nearly no pain, almost no blood, and a very quick healing.
What could have been done better? Certainly autoclaving the drill bits would have been preferred. Other than that, things went pretty much ideally. Also, I initially started spinning the bits slowly. Don't. Spin them fairly quickly. They're less likely to catch the bit on the tissue. Also be aware that, in addition to the risk of infection, there's likely a very real risk of urethral stricture, or extra tissue growing in the urethra. If you get a stricture, you will at least need to do some sounding to clear it, and it may require medical intervention.
Would I recommend that anyone else try it? Yes and no. If you have a hole that just won't close, and it's in tissue that's solid enough to stand up to the drill bits (ie: probably not ear lobes), and you won't mind if you actually wind up with a bit more scarring, then it's probably worth giving it a try. For now, though, I think this still needs to be considered experimental, at least until some more people have tried it and had as much success as I have had, and without problems. If you do try it, whether you have good results or bad, please submit your story here so we can all learn what, I think, is a new technique for getting rid of unwanted holes.