Nurses are sounding the alarm about the dangerous risks of dirty body piercings after a healthy teenager had to undergo reconstructive surgery due to a serious complication in her pierced ear.
Surgeons in New Jersey were forced to cut and drain a pus-filled wound that had developed in the cartilage of a 17-year-old girl’s ear after it became resistant to the antibiotics doctors had initially prescribed for her. fight infection.
The complication occurred about three weeks after she received the piercing, which was performed by a mall employee with a piercing gun.
When he finally went to the hospital, the infection had already eaten away some of the cartilage at the top of his ear.
Sarah Lacy, a registered nurse and associate director of Piercing Research and Innovation at cosmetics firm Rowan, told DailyMail.com that she sees complications like this frequently, and it’s usually due to mistakes made by the piercer.
She said: “There are a lot of things that can go wrong, you know, without proper care… You can end up with anything from a minor infection to something as intense as a huge, huge, huge cartilage-type infection.”
And in severe cases, this can lead to the operating table.
Complications are more common when someone has been pierced with an earring gun than when someone has been pierced with a hollow needle.
Lacy says these problems can be easily avoided with precautions that very few piercers take, and poorly trained assistants at chain jewelry stores are often to blame.
But some of the bad results are user errors.
Common mistakes people make with earrings are not cleaning them often enough, wearing one that is too short, and pressing the backs too close to the ear, which can cause irritation and encrustation.
Encrustation occurs when an infection causes the tissue around the earring to swell and “swallow” it into the ear.
tiktok user hannahbanana81374 shared a video of this disturbing event and wrote: “POV: You woke up to find that your ear swallowed your earring.”
Sara Lacy, a registered nurse, now works at Rowan, which is a piercing company that employs nurses to make new earrings.
In the video, Hannah shows her visit to the emergency room, where doctors numbed her tissue to remove the earring from inside her ear.
This is the common course of action for an inlaid earring, Lacy said.
Doctors usually use forceps to remove the earring or make a small incision to remove it.
Another culprit for earring mishaps is using the wrong piercing technique: More earrings placed with piercing “guns” become infected than those placed with a hollow piercing needle, Lacy said.
Rutgers doctors who operated on the 17-year-old with a cartilage infection noted that “the cartilage, if pierced, must be penetrated with sharp, hollow needles, which will extract the cartilage,” not with a gun.
Using a gun can cause the cartilage to “crack” and cause bleeding that will lead to later complications, they wrote.
Some guns are also reusable, meaning the same needle can be used on many people multiple times a day.
This, according to the Association of professional piercers‘putting clients in direct contact with the blood and bodily fluids of previous clients’, which is incredibly unhealthy.
People who work in chain piercing parlors or shopping malls are often trained to use a gun quickly and may be too young to really understand the importance of sterile technique.
Lacy told this website that she frequently sees patients come to her after a botched piercing at a mall.
Not everyone with a piercing will experience serious complications, but minor infections are common if you wear the wrong type of earrings or don’t properly care for your new piercing, Lacy said.
She advises against sleeping on your new piercing, stressed the importance of cleaning the area regularly to help avoid infection, and warned against wearing nickel-based earrings.
Most people who wear nickel earrings eventually develop a nickel allergy, Lacy said, which can lead to ear irritation and infection.
But, if despite your best plans, your ear becomes hot, red, or swollen, or you notice discharge coming out, you may have an infection.
The 17-year-old patient’s ear after reconstructive surgery, following her serious cartilage infection.
If caught early, minor infections are relatively easy to treat.
Using a warm compress and cleaning solution, which you can purchase at most piercing salons, should be enough to treat them.
But if not treated in time, the infection can progress and require a visit to the doctor.
Lacy told this website that one of her patients came to her after getting a piercing at a tattoo shop.
The punctured area was a large bubble of white pus.
‘It was so bad that I felt horrible for this person. So it was someone we were able to say, ‘Hey, you need to go get this checked out right now,'” he said.
In the worst case, earring infections can turn into perichondritis, Lacy said.
This is an infection of the ear cartilage that usually needs to be treated in hospital with an infusion of antibiotics.
Sometimes it can get so extreme that people need reconstructive surgery, like the 17-year-old girl who was taken to Rutgers for plastic surgery.
Fortunately, within 24 hours of being treated, she began to improve and her ear was saved.
Piercings are incredibly safe when done in a sterile environment and properly cared for, Lacy said.
As long as you do your research beforehand about the piercing studio and make sure you’re prepared to take care of it afterward, you’ll be fine, he added.
In your experience, getting a new piercing can be a fun and celebratory event. As someone who has gotten pierced before, she is especially proud to be the piercer now.
Lacy told DailyMail.com: “It’s a great privilege to be able to do this.” It’s also a fun service. And we are very happy to be able to do it.”