About a month ago, I replaced my conch earring with a new purple one. I was probably two excited about it, honestly. I just hadn’t changed my jewelry in eight years, and it was fun to go totally different! It was a week or two before it got a bit sore on me.
Conch rings are a bit tricky in general. Maybe not every one, but mine is. Because I wear a ring in mine, rather than a barbell, if I sleep on it funny, I pay for it. When it gets pulled on like that for a period of time, it gets very sore, and takes a few days to “heal.” I’ve heard it described as a piercing that never really completely heals. I’ve had this piercing for ten years now, so clearly its pretty good and healed. But when I got sore in that spot a couple of weeks back, I assumed I had just slept on it wrong, and dismissed it.
Our life is busy, and the state of my earring is not at the top of my priority list, so I didn’t really think about it much, or how long it had been sore. Or why it had been sore.
About a week, maybe ten days ago, it started oozing a bit. I figured I must have really annoyed it with that hypothetical bad sleep, and once again, left it alone. But I couldn’t for long, as it worsened. It got much more sore, and was oozing a lot. I tried to clean it with salt water, but it did nothing beyond making my ear wet.
It was REALLY hurting me when we were in Calgary, and I hoped that the chlorine in the pool would kill off whatever was in there. It did actually bring very slight temporary relief, but the dried crust just came off anyway and we were back to square one.
I was so relieved to pull the big bottle of hydrogen peroxide out when we got home. I know thats not “the” method these days, but I know it worked back in the day when I had my earlobes pierced, and I was willing to take on the sting that would come with it. Again, I had some relief with it, but it was short lived. It went from oozing when I fiddled with it to a constant disgusting stinky ooze. (Aren’t you guys glad you’re reading this? Don’t you feel like you were there? Delicious, I know.) But it was pretty out of control. The purple was coming off of the ring, indicating it was a much cheaper piece of jewellery than I had originally thought. I was disappointed, but I was also in pain, and ready to be out of pain.
Do you want to know how hard it was to get that hoop out of there?? My ear was SO swelled up, there was no possible way I could just slip it off. And it was such a beefy ring, I wasn’t strong enough to bend it. With that, every time I bumped it or pulled it at all, it shot pain around. All below my ear was very very sore (I assume from the infection spreading) and my ear itself was now massive and red and VERY angry. I eventually used a nail clipper as a wedge and forced the ring to open juuust enough to slip it out. And MAN! That hurt SO MUCH!!!
I doused my ear with hydrogen peroxide good and proper, and got all of the crusties cleaned off. I dug out the ring I had been wearing previous to this purple one. The ring was still fine, but the ball had fallen out, hence the new ring. But this one would at least keep the pierced hole from closing overnight. Since my ear was quite so angry, I had to use the same nail clipper method to stretch the ring further open, but it worked and I got the new ring in. It was so painful. I popped some Advil and went to rejoin Bachelor night.
Within minutes, my ear was back to its normal size, or at least very close. It also didn’t hurt as much at all. By the next morning, it was still producing some nasties, but the entire night produced about as much crud as it had in twenty minutes the day before. We are officially on the mend!
So. I’m still rocking this old ring, just for another day or two, to get nice and healed up, and I went to a piercing shop today and picked up a new titanium ring and bling. I’m excited to put that one in and never ever change it again, hahaha! Even once every 8-10 years was NOT worth this amount of pain!
Moral of the story: Buy quality jewellery! I’ve never had a reaction to cheap metals, but apparently I am, and I do NOT recommend messing with them! So. Much. Pain. Beware mall jewellery!!!