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So our game plan today is
we want to make the earlobe smaller,
balanced with your ear, and also close the hole.
So if I just close the hole, that's not going to get rid
of the whole problem with it hanging down.
So we're going to cut out a piece here,
cut out a piece here, close the opening in here
and bring it all together.
We're seeing more and more patients wanting the fix
because the peak of earlobe spacers
probably was about five to ten years ago,
so that group is now out of high school, looking for work,
and all of a sudden they're going,
"I don't think I want this anymore."
My name is Curtis Barnett, and I'm here today
to get reconstructive surgery on my earlobes.
Interview:
Yeah, every day.
Why so big?
It's the size I wanted to go.
My fascination first started when I was in high school.
I'd probably say around 16.
And I saw people with it and it looked really cool.
I just liked the look, the look that it would give me,
and so I stretched away.
You start out with your basic piercing.
Probably about a full year of just pain to stretch my ears.
I stretched them really fast.
I loved it.
But just as for work, it didn't work.
I do spray foam insulation for a living.
This mask I'd have to wear nice and tight.
Because I'm dealing with toxic chemicals.
It lines up right on the strap.
So it would always be caught under the strap,
up against my face.
And I couldn't wear them, it was too uncomfortable.
It just kind of grew old on me, type of thing.
Like, me taking them out for work,
I was spending more time without them in
than with them in, so I just kind of got used
to not having them in.
You could say I fell out of love with them.
Interview:
Well, yeah, I don't really want to have
these big, huge holes in my ears,
because it just looks horrible.
Every time I look in the mirror I see it,
and I just shake my head.
I'll do the right first, then I'll come to the left.
This is a little bit of a...
plan as we go.
[laughs]
Because we want to see that it looks good.
Did you just cut my lobe off?
Maybe.
Because that was the weirdest sound.
Yeah, that's the biggest problem with earlobes,
is you can hear everything.
We need to do a little bit of trimming
on that side to get the length right.
But once we'll get a stay stitch in,
we'll start.
So I'm just going to start to sew the earlobe together.
They key also is we want to be a bit conservative,
because we want a little bit of a notch,
we don't want it totally flat, because I know
as the scar tightens, it will contract.
The problem is that I think that a lot of people think
also if you take the spacer out,
it'll just go away.
I knew once I went over 3/4 of an inch,
I would never go back to normal, so...
I knew plastic surgery would be the only way.
This is probably going to be a lot easier to hide a scar
than it is to hide a big hole.
Yeah.
So good proportion. All right.
And that, my friends, is it.
And that's the lobe there, eh, on the table?
So this one was from the right ear.
And the left ear, because it had a bigger central portion,
we took out that piece first.
So you can see, a fair bit we took off.
Yeah.
I'm really shocked that I actually have lobes again.
Normal looking lobes.
It feels good.
I don't have to look at these big holes in my ear anymore.
It's going to take a bit of getting used to,
just because I've had the holes for so long,
but I like it.
Looks really good.