It’s hard for me to be away from my favorite piercing studio, Iris Piercing in Salt Lake City, and it is in fact a little dangerous for me. This is because if I go into the studio after not having had a piercing in awhile, I get an insatiable itch to get new piercings that doesn’t go away until I get them. So I decided to go ahead and get my rook pierced in my right ear after a few days of intense research and picture surfing. Usually once I want a piercing, it’s hard to get me out of doing it.

I got this piercing done last January during the holiday weekend along with a conch piercing in my other ear. Dustin was doing piercings on that particular day, so I told him what I wanted while he was waiting for some jewelry out of the autoclave for another client. While I waited, I picked out a 16g titanium Neometal curved barbell with side set cubic zirconium ends. I thought that this would be perfect since the gems in the 16g barbell are a lot bigger than the 18g barbell, and I wanted this piercing to be somewhat noticeable since it’s tucked into a weird part of the ear. But, I also didn’t want it to be too large because I tend to like really subtle piercings, especially in my ears.

After waiting and letting another customer go before me, I finally got my chance to get my piercing. Dustin led me to one of the piercing rooms with my freshly autoclaved jewelry. It was a pretty standard experience; he cleaned my ear and marked it up. I looked at the markings and was as satisfied as I could get since it is a hard piercing to look at marked on your own ear. The piercing itself didn’t really hurt too much, but it certainly feels weird since it is a curved piercing. I heard a slight crunching, but no pop like a lot of people experience because I have soft cartilage. I had very minimal bleeding and it looked gorgeous. I was told the standard aftercare and was sent on my merry way.

Now, this piercing has given me some serious trouble. Although rook piercings usually take a few weeks to swell up, this piercing swelled up within hours, and my ear felt really hot for a couple of days. I even had phantom pains in my ear that felt like a fresh piercing on places on my ear that weren’t pierced. While it didn’t bleed much initially, it did bleed on and off for several days after I had gotten the piercing.

I couldn’t sleep on the right side of my body for about two months unless I could position myself so that I wasn’t sleeping on my ear. My rook looked it was ready to pop it was so huge. I naturally have a really small, thin and defined rook, so seeing it so swollen and red was very odd for me, and a little scary. I was really scared for awhile that it might have gotten infected somehow, but it is not infected at all, just troublesome. I got this piercing 6 months ago, and while not as swollen as it was, it is still pretty swollen. It weeps lymph fluid like it’s going out of style; I literally pull out huge chunks of dried lymph fluid from the top and bottom of this piercing every few days, and if I sleep on the right side of my body with the jewelry not sitting right, my ear will hurt in the morning when I wake up for several hours, although I can sleep on the right side of my body now.

This piercing also has a nasty hypertrophic scar on the top side of the piercing. This scar has been there for about 4 months now and I’m still working on getting rid of it. It’s smaller than it was, but not gone. The problem is that I stop treating it as soon as it goes away, and then it comes back. But I know that as long as I am persistent in treating it, that it will go away eventually, I just have to be patient. This piercing could take longer than a year for me to heal based on how it’s healing now.

Overall, this piercing has given me some issues, but I still love it. I think that my experience is probably a little abnormal as people don’t seem to have as many problems with theirs as I have had with mine. As long as you’re willing to put up with the swelling and cleaning, it’s a lovely piercing to have. I hope that it will heal fully within the next six months, but we’ll see.