The Pre-Med Kid and The "Suddenly Un-Holy" Nostril

Greetings from San Francisco, smarty-pants Pocket Protector-type people!

I have a rather dire confession to make.  It's really serious, and I hope you all won't judge me for it...

...sometimes I'm kind of an idiot.  There.  I said it.  I'm so sorry if now you shall doubt everything I say.  I really try to keep those neurons firing in the order I want them in, but sometimes there's just too much cross-talk, and I end up doing stupid shit like the tale this blog will elaborate on.  So let's talk about my nose piercing, shall we?

You see that little silver fucker on my nostril?  Look at him all smug in my cartilage.  Little douchebag...

Back in January, I had something rather unfortunate happen in the ever-so magical land of my love-life.  So, instead of taking it out on the world in the form of ruining some innocent souls for the rest of their lives (and I'm talking "flipping off babies" extremes here), I decided to take out my frustration on my own flesh.  It's not self-mutilation if it's aesthetically pleasing, is expensive, and is done by a sterile instrument, right?  ANYWHO, I went down to Chameleon Ink in Bellingham to go get a needle jabbed through some well-innervated tissue and had a grand old time with my roommates and Thomas there.  It didn't hurt that bad, and if you really want the full account, you can read the blog about it.  It was great for a while, but then the jewel fell out and that was sad times since I'd have to wait 3 months to change it out, lest I endure a bunch of pain and possible infection.

How hard could this be, right?

So I waited.  Then that GLORIOUS day came upon me and I twisted out my nose screw and put in the new one.  Beautiful.  I loved my new stud and decided that it was high time to get a nose ring just to try it out.  Went back to Chameleon, bought the smallest one they had because I did not want to look like an animal that should be chasing angrily after a red cape, and shoved it into my nostril in my roommate's car.  The ring looks like the image to the right.  However, we could see a part of the flat bit inside my nose, so we twisted it in a little, and all was well.  The rest of that day was spent merrily wandering around Bellingham in the fleeting sunlight, taking pictures and getting used to this strange strip of silver in my peripheral vision, becoming all the more aware with every passing second that my nose is CONSTANTLY in my peripheral vision.  (You are now aware of this as well, and it shall bug you for a long time.  Mwahaha.)  Another day passes, and I realize that I will get fired from my job if I go in wearing anything but the stud, so I figure I should change it out.

This is where it gets messy...

Apparently, I put the damn thing in incorrectly.  You're SUPPOSED to put them in kind of backwards so that the flat end sits flush with the inside of your nostril.  Yeah, totally did NOT do that:

Left: What was       Right: What should have been

So after I was going around completely oblivious to this horrible mistake, my nose ring was busy moving slowly and smoothly in an out of its piercing canal like a good lover has sex.  I remove the nose ring just fine, go to put in my stud, and realize that I can't get it through to the other side of my nostril.  What. THE. FUCK?  I switch to the old stud just in case I'm having trouble dealing with the curve in the new one, and I STILL can't get it through, despite the straight end of the old stud being more than long enough to get through.  Now I'm freaking out.  I absolutely do not want to get it pierced again, but it hurts like a MOTHER to dig around in there.  So I do what any respectable college kid would do: call your roommate in for help.  Katie comes in, and we both come to the conclusion that this is what happened:

Do you SEE all that dead-space?  

Upon this realization, we both concluded that the only way for me to save it was to break through the already healed-over skin and essentially re-pierce my nose.  Holy shit balls.  

Katie says she thinks she knows something that could help, walks out of the room, comes back in 5 minutes and is carrying frozen peas and ice that is shaped like little fish.  Wonderful.  I spend about 30 seconds numbing my nose, and at that point, the anatomy part of my brain can virtually feel the basement membrane of my epithelium coming back together to stimulate rapid mitosis of skin cells.  I get the stud back in there and start wiggling...and lo and behold, I actually manage to get it through.  Then I start bleeding a bit, which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't had a fish-shaped ice cube melting from being shoved up my nose for the past 30 seconds.  Now there are diluted bloody cotton balls all over my bathroom counter.  And yes, I might have gotten the stud back in, but let's remind ourselves that my stud looks like what's pictured at left...so I hadn't gotten it ALL the way in yet.

Katie grabs my hand, we count to three, and I scream out a string of cuss words that sounds something akin to "MOTHER FUCKING FUCK GOD FUCKING FUCKK FUCKKKKKKKK" as I twist this god-damned stud through two turns into my nostril.  Of course, now I'm bleeding even more, so more cotton balls end up on my counter.  It looks like someone was trying to re-create a scene from Dexter using white mice at this point.

Icing on the cake?  I hadn't washed my hands with anti-bacterial soap.  So now I'm freaking out about this stupid thing getting infected.  I respond to this anxiety by saturating a cotton ball in my saline cleaning solution and shove it up my throbbing nose and rub Neosporin ALL over the outside.  Not only that, but the stud that went in is the old jewel-less one.  And I won't be comfortable taking it out for at least another month, despite feeling like a total BAMF for actually going through the re-piercing and it NOT getting infected (#winning?).

Moral of the story?  I am only an idiot on rare occasions, but when it happens, you better know damn well that I'm going to make it count.  

Until next time, dweebies <3