Sorry for not posting more yesterday, but I had my head slammed in a car door (don’t ask!) and got a concussion and didn’t feel like writing. Let me start off today with a pictorial story from “a young lady from Chicago-land” and her earlobe tearing misadventures in the Ukraine involving stitching… I’m actually not convinced this needed to be stitched (I think it would have healed on its own, personally), but I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth!
This story is in her own words — continue reading to see what happened.
“Adventures in doing laundry: As I hopped down from the chair I was standing on to hang laundry, my rounded horse-shoe piercing (it had one smallish ball and one biggish ball on it) got caught on the wire clothes-line on my Ukrainian balcony. My ear was tearing as the piercing was actually bending (skin is strong!) and then the back ball (luckily, the smaller ball!) exploded through my ear and out came the piercing. The tear was only in the front of the lobe. The ball took a tiny ring of flesh with it, but otherwise the back was undamaged.”
Inset: “What the ring looked like before it bent on the wire, and after… I can’t believe how strong human flesh is! Oh, and don’t mind the little bit of my flesh.”
“Ew, a bit of grit in there!”
“Yeah, um, Ukranian hospitals? No thanks. I’d heard nothing but horror stories all week from my students, and then this. I went with what my dad taught me: Superglue fixes everything. The arrow indicates the end of the tear. It looks good, but actually, I screwed up by getting glue into the tear too, so, eventually, it would all come out in a plug and I’d be back to square one. The piercing is tilted up, btw, to maintain the hole without possibly getting pulled on and opening the tear again. Smart, huh?”
“Sure enough, three days later, the superglue all came out and off, leaving the cut wide open again. Nope, still, not going to a Ukrainian hospital. You know, the one time I was in one, an angry nurse chastised me for my piercings and told me that because I had piercings, I would have deformed children! Time for self-done stitches.”
“I actually didn’t mean to make the stitch so wide like that. In retrospect, I think it was good though, because the first and middle stitch was really secure and then the top and bottom stitches didn’t go through as much flesh.”
“Three stitches (the top and the bottom weren’t as deep as the middle). It looks irritated but it’s just camera contrast — it looked great. My roommates were impressed.”
Left: “Immediately after removing the stitches (left them in for six days)” and Right: “Three days after removing the stitches. Yay! I’m a doctor now. It’s not the first time I’ve given myself stitches in fact…”
