Loooong story...
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything
(Listen to the Johnny Cash version, it's better than Trent Reznor's (of Nine Inch Nails) original.)
I like BMEzine.com, but what irritates me is the people who make out that body modification has to be some kind of transcendent spiritual experience. Especially "experience" (personal account) essays that have that wanky OMG OMG OMG tone you get from women and/or people who think they're doing it to free themselves from some sort of repression.
S'r'sly - when I went to get my tattoo, my first visit to the shop to show the artist the photo I wanted it based on made me more nervous than the second visit when I actually got it done. Physical pain is tolerable - strange people scare the crap out of me. I was quite happily listening to the BBC's old radio play of the Lord of the Rings the whole time. No massively emotional aftermath, no significant endorphin rush, the doors of perception didn't open up, et cetera. (And I didn't want them to, because I had to bicycle home late at night afterward.)
Anyway...just want to make it clear that I'm not into self-mutilation. I just thought "Hurt" was an appropriate soundtrack. ^_^
I like experimenting with my body, doing weird things to it - which is perhaps why I dislike some of the essays on BMEzine so much. Instead of entangling the body with the mind or spirit (to me, mind, spirit, and brain are the same, bugger dualism), I like to occasionally step back and examine mine as an object. Joining crew in freshman year was part of that, as is capoeira now. The tattoo was part of that. Pain isn't necessarily the desired outcome; the point is to observe and record what outcomes I get from a tested activity.
Of course, it's a valuable object - you don't want to do damage it beyond self-repair capacity if you can help it. People have been piercing ears since, oh, millenia ago, but we don't have the tradition any more where your mum or your aunty or granny does your ears using tested and tried methods. So, substitute the Internet, caution, and common sense.
Step 1: Get supplies. One word: eBay. I'd seen the word "bioplast" thrown around a number of times as being a good material for healing piercings. However, it's bloody near impossible to find out what the material actually is, even from the manufacturer's site. If you do a PubMed search for it, it sounds like there are two different materials for which the word is used, one a "polyvinylacetate polyethylene", and the other some kind of synthetic fibrin which will be absorbed by the body - the latter obviously being undesireable for an earring. So I went on faith and bought a 16 ga bioplast labret stud.
The other thing was where to get needles. I could easily get 18 gauge needles from work, but somehow...on a moral level it seems worse than, say, swiping a pen from the supply cabinet. I guess it's because a needle has much greater potential for abuse than a pen. You cannot inject heroin with a ballpoint pen and it would be extremely difficult to give someone AIDS or hepatitis with a Bic that has been used by an infected person.
Apparently professional piercers in the US prefer to use purpose-made piercing needles, whereas those in the UK and Europe prefer cannula needles, which are made for giving people IV drugs. It's a needle that comes with a plastic catheter wrapped around it - in the body piercing context, one withdraws the needle, leaving the cannula in place, sticks the piece of jewellery into the other end of the cannula, and pulls the cannula back out, circumventing the pain of having to shove a piece of jewellery directly into a fresh wound. Figuring it was best to go with a brand name, I got two 14 ga Braun Introcan needles from BodyOxide on eBay. Apparently Customs didn't mind the baldly honest description on the label:
First reaction: It's freaking enormous! (ruler marked in cm)
95% ethanol and cottonwool came from the pharmacy, and a slice of potato to support the back side of my ear from the supermarket...I saved the rest of the potato in the fridge because I hate wasting food. Steve will definitely laugh when he sees how small it is.
Step 2: Pick a spot. This produced a definite sense of deja vu because I've been candling a lot of embryonated chicken eggs to grow virus in. It's impossible to see in the original picture, but the two green lines demarcate blood vessels, and the X is roughly where I pierced later. Turned out to be a good idea, since there was little blood.
Step 3: Clean up. It's pretty frigging impossible to create a sterile field in one's bathroom. When you think about it, though, what's the need? As I pointed out before, people have been doing this for thousands of years...in houses, in mud huts, in nomads' tents in the desert...whatever. Key word is "sanitary", not "sterile". So I cleaned my sink and the top of the toilet tank, put paper towels on them, and wiped my ear, gloves, and the potato with alcohol.
(By the way, microbiological training says that there's no such thing as sterilizing tools in a flame. You sterilize them in alcohol, then ignite them to remove the alcohol. You do NOT hold them in the flame from a lamp, candle, whatever - sure, it'll kill germs, but then the object will be covered in a fine layer of soot and grease. This is what I normally do to pop big pimples.)
Step 4: Poke. I tried to aim the needle as close to normal to the surface of the ear as possible. I slowly increased the pressure until it became clear that it was only poking through the skin layer =P One good firm push sent the point into the potato. There was no crunchy sound of cartilage shattering, but the sensation was clearly different (both in the part holding the needle and the part being pierced) from penetrating soft tissue. Here's the cannula left stuck through my ear:
To the inevitable "Did it hurt?" - yes, dumbo, it did. I don't think I have an unusually high tolerance for pain, but abstracting pain and separating it from the emotional response makes it less - painful.
Step 5: Insert jewellery. This was the true nightmare. As explained, a cannula makes insertion of the jewellery into a fresh piercing much easier. The nightmare part was putting the front on. This is the labret stud:
To give you a sense of scale, 16 ga is 1.2 mm. This is how wide the plastic post is. The titanium bezel for the gem has a tiny pin on the back which goes into the hollow post. Even with nice tight nitrile gloves on, my fingers couldn't reach into the bowl adequately. Hitting a hole less than 1 mm in diameter with a pin about 4 mm long took me half an hour in front of the mirror, a bamboo skewer, and a lump of poster putty.
It's surprising that my ear wasn't dripping with blood after all that fiddling. You can see the back of it in the photo at the top - some, but hardly weltering, and none at all on the front.
Here's all the stuff I used:
And here's the new earring - hopefully the post is long enough to allow for potential swelling.
In my earlobe is an Anatometal niobium ring from Tribaletic. I've been wearing them for weeks because they're super comfy and I'm too lazy to change. Besides, wearing jewellery made of strange inert metals is cool.
Aaaaaand...now I'm going to soak my new piercing in salt water for a bit and then go to bed. Because it's bloody two a.m. Piercing took 40 minutes, blogging it took two hours. Narcissism >_<
Feel free to offer suggestions for what to do with the second needle. However, "nipples" or "genitalia" will not be entertained. =P
Labels: body modification, DIY
