First, a bit of background on my stretches
When I was about 16 (26 now) I had my ears stretched by a local piercing studio, and being naive at the time just went ahead with what they reccomended (which I now know to be a load of bull). They stretched my ears from 14g to 4g in basically 9-10 days, reccomending that a stretch is fine every few days, so took me from 14g straight to 10g then 6g then to 4g. My ears at this time where disgusting, red, sore and oozing with pus
so I took them out after a month or 2.Recently I took an interest in stretching again, so went to the same studio (silly me) to get them stretched. I must point out at this time (around 2 months ago) that I had not yet discovered this forum or done research around stretching.
So, since I had been wearing pretty heavy bcrs for the last 10 years, my lobes still had quite a lot of give in them for larger guage jewellery, and a 6g tunnel fitted in snugly with no stretching required, the pirecer gave me a slight stretch to 4g, which with no pain, no blood or puss or even redness I was pleased with, the piercer advising me to come back in a week or so for another stretch.
So after getting home, I did a bit of research on stretching and came accross the advice to leave stretching weeks, if not months before going again, even at small sizes. At this point there where alarm bells ringing about going back to somewhere that advises on a stretch in a matter of days, and that there where staff there walking around with lovely catt butt ears
So, I ordered some steel tapers and single flare tunnels in 2g and 0g sizes, and after leaving my 4g tunnels in for a month or so, took them out to make the stretch to 2g. To my surprize the taper wasnt even necessary as the tunnel slid straight in, no stretch required
(Which after reading these forums suprises me, as my ears must be full of scar tissue from the earlier bad stretching)
At this point I started reading these forums and advice that forum members here where giving, and after a little while, decided to give the 0g stretch a go. Left ear, no real problem, a little warmth but slid in, tunnel straight in after
My right ear however was a little more stubborn and felt like it was pinching, but being pretty determined to do it after doing my left, i pushed on through. Taper through, could not get the tunnel in, bad times for me, as i hate not having equally sized jewellery (I had 2 eyebrow bars in each eyebrow for this reason (3 now retired though!)) so was pretty forceful, but still no avail. After all this I checked the hole which was pretty red by then and swabbed it with a cotton bud. This revealed the tiniest micro speck or blood, at which point I stopped, after having read these forums and seen that any sign of blood is bad I immediately downsized (both ears back to 2g as they where pretty loose already) and have been caring for my ear since, using sea salt soaks and generally babying it, and it is healing really well!
Now i have got bio-oil massages ready for my ears for when they are fully healed and I am going to use the nice slow taping method when they are finally ready to stretch again.
Without the info on this forum, I would have continued stretching regardless (and clueless), and most likely would have caused more damage to my ears at some point.
SO....A big thank you for the advice given on these forums, I know I have been stupid in the past with stretching but, thanks to this forum's members experience and guidance I will now hopefully have happy, healthy stretched lobes for the future, and be performing safe stretching practices from now on.
Thank you all, and thanks for reading
