Mild ear-piercing-related healing grossness in this post, if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing. ♥
I got my stupid slow-to-heal helix (ear cartilage) piercing looked at today, 15 months after I got it pierced. At about the 11 month mark when it not only still hadn’t healed but was still/again actively gooey, I gave up on the “just clean it with saline 2x a day” advice and swabbed it with hydrogen peroxide a few times like we did with piercings when I was a kid. It fuzzed up in a satisfyingly disgusting way for a few days, and then nearly all the goo was gone. Yay. I went back to using saline.
But it has retained a bruised-like look beneath the ball/front of the earring, and not made any really super noticeably improvement in the 3 or 4 months since, so last week I took out the H2O2 again and used it for several days in a row. The bruised look faded noticeably, and the fuzzing response to infection/goo was pretty minimal except for the very first time or two I did it. So, okay, it seemed like it was improving more. Good. Went back to saline.
So she looked at it today and said the back is all healed up and looks great!!! The front, she said, was close to healed but looked “moist,” which, like, that’s just not a word you really want to hear in relation to a healing process. It’s just not. I am now to only clean it ONCE a day with saline, and dry it Very Heckin’ Thoroughly. I may, if I think it’s important, soak a cotton ball with saline once a week and fold it around the piercing to give it a thorough soaking, and then dry it Very Heckin’ Thoroughly again. She thought about another month of that should heal it up, and that I should come back then to have it looked at again, and if it wasn’t all the way healed we could discuss different earrings that might, IDK, change the pressure or something.
She also said she’d reopened one of her own helix piercings a few months ago and it was still hurty, and that helix piercings were just really slow and tricky and the problem, of course, is that once people GET them they tend to really LIKE them so they don’t WANT to get rid of it even if it’s slow to heal, and that’s exactly my situation. :)
But I really do want it to heal, because I want to get a 3rd piercing on my other ear and I’d like to be able to reliably sleep on at least ONE side of my head…