In a blog post of spectacular unimportance, I am so very happy to say that my dumb ear, in which I got a helix piercing on October 19, 2022, has actually healed!
The remainder of this post may involve vague grossness that the delicate among us might not want to read. Not lots of grossness, but a bit. :)
After noticing that it seemed to have (for want of a better phrase) dried up a lot recently, I went in to have it checked yesterday. The nice woman, who I think was an entirely new person from anybody else who’d ever looked at it, examined it quite closely and said it’s still a bit red and sort of swollen/chunky-feeling, but that there is FINALLY no more moisture or “goo,” as I was calling it (“secretions,” she said, “that’s the professional word for ‘goo,'”) inside the ear hole anymore. So basically it’s HEALED! It still needs time to rest and hopefully the remaining swelling will fade, but honestly I’m so glad. I’ve been fighting the sunk cost fallacy with it for months, trying to convince myself that if it hadn’t healed by October 19 (which would be the 2 year mark) that I should give it up, but after spending so much TIME trying to get it to heal I really didn’t WANT to, and also I LIKE it, so I’ve been agonizing and kind of miserable about it.
But. This is actually a huge step forward. It’s HEALED, not just mostly healed or almost there, but actually no longer an open wound and I’m so incredibly relieved.
Right now I’ve got a hoop in it–I have since maybe March? Maybe April? Maybe January? I don’t even remember, but I think March. It hadn’t healed with a stud and the hoop was kind of the last-ditch attempt to see if it would heal. They don’t usually use hoops because they move more and are easier to knock around, which can cause, healing issues, but since the front hadn’t healed in 15-18 months ANYWAY they figured trading the stud for a hoop wasn’t going to hurt it at that point, and it might help. Which it has! If I’m going to have a random earring in it while it continues to settle I’d rather it was a stud, but also…I think I’ll leave the hoop in place until at least October, because even though I really want to trade it out for a stud I also don’t want to aggravate it at what is presumably a fairly early stage of Actually Healed.
Anyway, the point of that paragraph was more or less going to be “I suspect that overall I’m going to want to choose a permanent stud for that ear hole, because I suspect it may remain delicate and it might be better to just leave one there rather than take them in and out,” but that’s also probably a problem for Future Me. I have a tiny diamond earring I bought in college when I got my 2nd piercing in my left ear that may end up being the permanent earring there, but I wouldn’t want to sleep on it, so…well, we’ll see how the whole thing heals up in the longer term.
I’m really relieved I chose not to take action when the woman in May who looked at it when it had REALLY gooed up said I had cartilage slippage and it would never heal and that I should take it out. It wasn’t that I was certain she was wrong, but it was at a really bad swollen stage right then and I’d seen it like that before and it had calmed down, so at the very least I wanted it to calm down before I made a decision about removing it. I went back in about a month later when it had calmed and they said it was still ‘moist’ (not a word you really want to hear about a wound, especially one almost 2 years old) but that there wasn’t any sign of slippage or anything, so, like, I THOUGHT SO. And now two months after THAT it has finally reached the tentative stage of Actually Healed.
Man, this was supposed to be part of my Stuff I Wanted To Do To Celebrate Turning Fifty. I planned for this 4th ear hole on the left side and to get a 3rd on the right side, and then maybe get the tattoo I’ve been thinking about for years. But I didn’t want to get the right ear pierced again until I knew if the left one was gonna heal, because I’ve never wanted a matching number of ear holes. I’ve always wanted 1 more on the left than on the right. So I couldn’t get a non-cartilage-piercing that would almost certainly heal up just fine before the damn helix one healed. So I got the left one done SEVEN AND A HALF MONTHS before my birthday, ’cause that should be enough time, right? And now here I am, 51 and counting, and that piercing has only just now healed. I can still do the rest, obviously, but, like, who gets body mods to celebrate turning 52? That’s just weird, not, like, you know, a Statement or a Decisive Action or whatever. :)