- Less than 24 hours later I woke up,
the piercing was gone, again.
(melodic music)
- Hi I'm Carrie and today I'm gonna tell you
my piercing horror story.
So when I was about 22 or 23 I decided
I wanted to get a different kind of piercing
because I had already had a lot of the more normal ones
like belly button and the different ear ones.
But I decided a dermal would be a really great one to do.
It's like a little sliver of metal
that they embed into your skin.
A lot of people have them in their back dimples
or they'll have them like on their collar bones and things.
I decided to get it on my ring finger.
But the longer that the dermal is in your body,
your skin is growing and grasping onto that dermal.
So eventually it started to heal up and look normal
and I thought that it was completely healed,
and I was at Venice Beach one day
and I stuck my hands in the ocean,
you know, just playing in the water,
and the next day I started to notice
that my finger was a bit red.
I got a little bit of the ocean water into my piercing,
and so I was like oh it's starting to get a little red,
a little bit redder, oh my hand's swelling,
oh my arm's swollen.
Like literally my whole entire hand was just like
this big, massive, red, awful, swollen looking thing.
I thought that it would just go away.
I didn't realize the severity of the infection.
So I let it go, and it just kept swelling and swelling
and finally when my friend noticed how swollen it was,
that's when I decided I really needed
to get my butt to the doctor.
The doctor gave me antibiotics and there wasn't
really much she could do for the numbing,
so, she had to rip, rip, rip,
because as I said, the dermals, they embed into your skin.
So she had to rip, rip, rip it out,
and I was just screaming at the top of my lungs
at the med center, and eventually it came out
and the antibiotics worked, and I've got a whole hand.
Yay.
- So, this all happened on my 18th birthday,
is like when everything initially started.
I really wanted to get my nose piercing,
because my parents didn't let me get my nose piercing.
So my parents were out of town on my 18th birthday
and I was like this is the perfect time
to get my nose pierced.
I went to this one piercing shop.
I should have known that I shouldn't have
gone to this place when I pulled up initially
because it was just in an area that like
a piercing shop shouldn't be located,
like right next door there was an auto shop,
and then like the store right next to that
was like a tire store.
So I was kind of like oh, maybe they just had extra space
and decided to open up a piercing shop
for like some extra cash, I don't know,
that's like what it looked like.
I went to this piercing shop, got my nose pierced,
everything was fine.
Went home, and everything was good.
About two days later my nose piercing
fell off in the morning.
I didn't know what to do because I knew that
it probably fell off when I was sleeping,
and that it was gonna close pretty soon
if I didn't get it re-pierced back in.
So I went back to the piercing shop,
and of course they were closed
on like a Saturday or something.
I don't know if that's normal, but they were closed.
So I ended up going to another piercing shop
to kind of get the jewelry, the stud back into my nose.
The guy there told me like,
"Yeah we can put it back in for you,
"but you should probably know like the reason
"why it fell out was because the stud was very cheap
"and it was very small."
So he recommended that I put in another stud from him
that would probably be a little more sturdy
and like stay in longer.
But I just wanted to put the stud back in
and then just leave.
So I told him, I was like, "You know what,
"this isn't gonna happen again, it's fine,
"just put it back in my nose and we're all good from here."
Little did I know, for you to re-put,
like reinsert a jewelry back into your nose after a piercing
you sort of have to repierce that same hole.
So I started crying.
I didn't know what to do,
but I was like I'm already this committed,
like he already sanitized my nose at this point,
like I just have to do it.
Probably the worst pain of my life.
But you know, I had the piercing back in.
So I left.
About less than 24 hours later I woke up,
the piercing was gone, again.
And so I had to go back, I called the guy ahead of time,
so the second I got back to the piercing shop
he knew exactly who I was.
I had to go through the whole procedure
with the needle in my nose again,
and I was just like at this point I'm way too committed,
way too deep in to not get this nose piercing anymore.
But at this point I kind of knew it was my fault,
that I should have just listened to him
and get like the sturdier stud to begin with.
So I just decided to go ahead and get that sturdy stud,
the third time around.
And then ever since then I still have my nose pierced.
- So my obsession for a belly button piercing
started in the summer of my freshman year of high school.
I remember this one time Britney Spears was on the TV
and what stuck out to me the most was her belly button ring,
and I was just thinking I have to have one.
So I came up with this idea to buy a piercing kit
off of Amazon, and I also bought like a really cute
dangly jewelry piercing.
So my friend is with me, and she goes to the kitchen
and gets ice, and I get the alcohol pad
and I start cleaning the clamp.
And I start cleaning my belly button.
And I tell my friend, "Okay, well you need to mark
"exactly where you're gonna pierce it."
My friend, she goes in with the piercing,
and unbeknown to me she pierces through
less than an inch of skin.
Like through a tiny piece of skin.
There was barely any skin supporting the piercing
and I didn't realize this but I look down
and I'm thinking oh, okay, well it looks great.
Weeks go by and I notice that my body started
rejecting the piercing, so I would take it out
and then I would wait for my belly button to heal again.
And this was months later, 'cause it took a long time
to fully heal again, and then I would put it back in.
So everything seemed fine, it didn't seem like
it was getting infected 'cause I was cleaning it everyday.
Not shortly after that has happened,
maybe like a month later, I was cleaning my room
and I was actually vacuuming the carpet,
and I grazed my hand over my belly button
and the piercing falls out onto the floor.
And the skin that was around the piercing was hanging,
and it looked so gross.
At that moment I was like all right,
I'm not gonna put it back in.
I cleaned it with alcohol and I just waited
up to a year for the skin to completely heal,
because the skin was just hanging off of my belly button
and it just, I was like I disfigured myself.
And I realized that I should've just waited
until I was of age to get it done professionally
and my belly button still doesn't look the same to this day,
even though it's fully healed.
But that is my horror piercing story.