The Piercing Problem
So here’s the problem with piercings. I like piercings, I have two on my left ear: the tragus, and the anti-tragus (sort of). I got my tragus done on a whim whilst travelling because I was hung over and felt like it. It didn’t hurt and only bothered me for about a week. This summer I got my anti-tragus done. This had been planned for months before I finally got round to doing it. The piercist talked me out of the anti-tragus and encouraged me to go ever so slightly higher up the ear on the promise that it would heal easier and that she’d only ever done it to a couple of people. I wasn’t too bothered and was easily swayed by the idea of it being an experiment. Well, she was lying. It hurt, a lot. She struggled to get the needle through which resulted in a lot of pain, blood and swelling. For a few days it was very swollen and very blue. This was not good. Eventually it started to heal and the swelling went down. At the time I couldn’t sleep on it so had to train my body to want to sleep on my right side rather than my left. This didn’t work so I devised a method of reshaping my pillow to create a small ear sized hole so the piercing wasn’t touching anything. This was 3 months ago. I still sleep with my ear in the hole and every morning I wake up and have to clean off some crusty ear gunk, which is gross.
I can cope with the ear goo and the fact that I now don’t really use a pillow and often have a sore neck. The thing I’m struggling to cope with is the fact that I can’t wear large headphones any more. For a while I couldn’t even use in-ear headphones which wasn’t so bad because shortly after the piercing I lost my iPod anyway. I can now balance in-ear headphones precariously between the two piercings but proper headphones are a no go. I miss my big headphones and the amazing sounds they fed into my ears. I had to put them in a drawer to try and forget about them but I still miss them from time to time.
I could take the piercing out, but I doubt I will. I won’t get any more, but I doubt that’s true. I’ll just wait for it to eventually heal and then retrieve my headphones. Another 3 months just might do it…maybe…
