…if not his placement. I’m always surprised at just how long people keep piercings that are going wrong. I suspect that in the time it took me to get this image posted, this reader from China has already lost his nipple piercing — I’m actually amazed it’s holding at all with that big ring and that tiny strip of flesh.
Rachel (iam:Freedom), who wears a silicone heart-shaped implant in her chest (put in by Brian on — unintentionally — 6/6/06) was concerned about the very real possibility of what would happen should she be in an accident that left her unconscious or unable to speak and under emergency medical care. How would the doctors respond to a heart-shaped lump on her chest if she was banged up? In order to reduce the risk factors, she wears a bracelet which reads, “SILICONE HEART IMPLANT LOCATED ON MY CHEST”, which may well save everyone quite a bit of grief one day.
Continuing the gross-out trend, XWV from Estonia claims that his nipple was just fine before the beer… Not sure if that means this was a beer-related incident, or if he was using beer to clean the piercing…
Stephan writes,
We all know those horror stories about cheap and crappy jewellery but now I found impressive proof! When I talked to a doctor about cheap jewellery and risks he said he must have a rusty piercing barbell somewhere, having had a patient come in with a highly infected nipple-piercing which she was not able to remove after several days of pain.
This is a picture of that jewellery, which Stephen now uses as the perfect poster for their organization to inform people about what to look for in quality jewellery.
A week after getting his tongue scalpelled to 2ga by John Joyce (Scarab Body Arts, Syracuse, NY), Slalamander Steve was still experiencing quite a lot of swelling, and, as you can see here, bruising. Thankfully, other than a little bit of a skin flap at the edge of the piercing, he’s doing fine now, with the bruising and swelling mostly gone and his speech back to normal.
So I wrote up a long set of potential questions for a series of piercer interviews, and I was thinking how few piercers I know that are “just piercers”… Almost everyone these days does scarification, or implants, or tongue splitting as well. There seem to be very few pure piercers out there — not that that’s a bad thing and not that it’ll stop me from interviewing them. Anyway, if anyone has suggestions on who they’d like to see in the piercer interviews — or wants to volunteer — I’m listening.
* * *
On to the entry… I remember when Steve Haworth first popularized circular barbell implants (“the piercer’s implant”) in the mid-90s, he made a point out of welding the beads on to ensure that there was no “gap” for bacteria or dead tissue to collect. However, many people still implant regular body jewelry. While it’s generally not going to cause a problem, it could increase the risk level slightly.
Given the discussion about regretting mods that’s been happening a lot lately, I thought I’d put up some photos of what’s becoming an increasingly common modification, the surgical reversal of stretched earlobes back to “normal”. Most definitely procedures like this (offered by both cosmetic surgeons and by body modification practitioners) are rising in how much money they generate as more and more people change their minds for a wide variety of reasons.
Like tattoo removal, these procedures don’t tend to be cheap, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to well over a thousand, to say nothing of carrying their own risks as well. Thus, the surer you can be before undertaking semi-permanent body modification, the better!
Continue reading for more photos as S’s ears healed.
The photos above are before (duh), looking quite nice with those clear plugs, and on the day of the surgery. The photo below takes us to day three:
It’s looking happier on day eight:
Finally, on day twelve the sutures are out and you can get a fairly good idea of what it’s going to look like — the shape of the lobe is pretty much perfect, although there is certainly some residual scarring, especially on the left lobe. Note though that almost all of this scarring should disappear in time — at twelve days they’re still very fresh.
A while back we documented Lane’s leg implant gone terribly wrong — part one, part two, part three (and it actually continues after that as well) — recently another problem piece, this one on iam:teenagerfrommars, manifested itself. What’s interesting to me is that in “body modification-style” implants on the calf, I’ve seen a very high complication rate — probably over 50% — whereas in the medical community, calf implants are actually a very low risk implant comparatively speaking (usually the ratio is the other way around). I don’t know if this is because they have a larger surface area, or some other factor.
Sarah emphasizes that she doesn’t regret what she went through, and doesn’t want to scare anyone away from implants, but does feel that it’s important that her story be shared, and I agree. This summer she decided on a large crop circle implant, carved from silicone and about 8″ by 3″, to be put into her left calf — this is the photo the artist sent her of the piece prior to implantation.
Continue reading for how the events unfolded.
At first things seemed like they’d be fine — at twelve days it was starting to get definition and she was looking forward to it being healed:
Unfortunately healing was far from easy. Over the next six months it was constantly filling with fluid, then swelling up painfully and enough to make walking unpleasant. She drained it several times which did little but cause her more pain, and she was losing hope that it was every going to settle down. In addition, her incision never healed properly, presumably due to the constant pressure from the swelling.
About three weeks ago she found herself in more pain than usual, but didn’t have any of the typical signs of infection, so she thought it was fine and planned on toughing it out. A few days later, at work, he leg felt “kind of odd — it didn’t hurt but it didn’t feel right either.” It didn’t help that on her way home from work she banged her leg on her car door. When she got home and took off her pants she discovered that the implant had begun to break through the skin.
She made a doctor’s appointment, and within a day a larger portion of the silicon was exposed and looking very unpleasant. Several days later when she had her appointment — her doctor was very understanding and non-judgmental by the way — they referred her to a plastic surgeon two days later, and instructed her to dress the wound and clean and change it daily (a very painful process).
They’d also swabbed her to check for infection, which came back positive. Sarah was put on heavy-duty antibiotics to keep the minor infection from getting worse or going systemic, and after her meeting with the surgeon was scheduled to have her procedure under general anesthesia two days later. This was her first hospital visit so she was quite nervous!
They made quite a large incision to remove the whole implant, and sealed it up with about twenty staples, leaving a drain (the photo above was the day after the staples were removed). Because of sickness from the anesthesia and her pain medication, Sarah mostly just slept for the first week, and describes the checkup three days later as “the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life”. A home care nurse has been helping her, and may continue to for several weeks. She has not yet been able to return to work.
Bearing him no ill will, she may be going back to the same artist to have a scarification piece done to hide the scars left from the surgery, but emphasizes to those considering implants, “just make sure you know what you’re getting into and don’t take the risks of any procedure lightly, you never know.”
Speaking of both keloids and John Joyce, he had a customer come in with extremely deformed lobes from keloids erupting out of blowout from ear piercings. He cut off and cauterized one of the keloids for the customer (I assume the remainder will follow), and cauterized it. Six weeks later, the keloid is gone (depending on the person they can grow back no matter what treatment is used) and healing has been exceptional.
I suppose it’s inevitable now that people have been installing dermal anchors in huge numbers for a year or two that I’ve started to see a flood of somewhat gory removal and rejecting photos… That said, as unpleasant as these particular pictures left, the scars are extremely minor.
Top right rejection – Kate.