The writer of the following article has a good sense of humor. She has needed that humor at times, especially when confined to a hospital bed. During one five day period she lay in a hospital bed with two stainless steel piercing needles stuck in different parts of her body. Into her hospital room came one joking visitor, a doctor who was not treating her immediate medical problem. That doctor had seen the hospital patient for a seemingly unrelated problem. That doctor proposed performance of yet a third stainless steel piercing. The doctor joked about the information that he could obtain from such a piercing.
Hollywood has made a movie about a stainless steel piercing. In that movie the main character has an operation. He does not respond as expected to the anesthesia. As a result, he feels the stainless steel piercing into his skin during the operation. While in terrible pain, he is unable to call-out for relief.
The writer of this article does not plan to watch that movie. The writer of this article has had more than eight surgeries, and she expects to have more. Not one of those surgeries was for the placement of surgical steel jewelry. In fact, the scars left by those surgeries eliminated many of the places where the writer might have placed a piece of piercing jewelry.
The writer of this article has had scars on her abdomen, scars on her neck, scars on her left breast and scars on her back. Since the age of 6 months she has had a scar over her right eye. That scar marks the spot where the writer once had a red birthmark. The writer has no desire to highlight any scar with a piece of piercing jewelry.
After one surgery the writer did have more than one stainless steel piercing. She had more than one piercing for the placement of a needle, a needle that was connected to a long tube. That tube carried a solution containing antibiotics. The piercing needle carried the solution from the tube into one of the writer’s veins.
Sometimes the needle would work its way out of the skin. Sometimes it remained in the skin, but the fluid in the tube stopped flowing into the vein. In either case, the writer then needed a new needle and a new stainless steel piercing.
One time the City of Houston (the city in which the surgery had taken place) sent a group of paramedics into the room of that future writer. The City hoped to give their paramedics some needed training. The paramedics needed to learn how to perform a stainless steel piercing.
Fortunately, the female patient was not alone when that strange group entered her room. Her mother was also in the room. After the group left, the patient and her mother were able to laugh at their own amazement—amazement that such a strange group had come so unexpectedly into their normally quiet room.
Later that same summer, the medical professionals seemed to be thinking up new reasons for putting a piercing needle in the female patient. At one point a surgeon had to remove a shunt that had been placed in the patient’s head. That surgical removal was done on an emergency basis. The female patient then had a temporary device put in the top of her head.
For five days, the patient had to lie in bed with two piercing needles—one in her head and one in whatever part of her body had had a vein that a trained nurse (or a paramedic) had deemed acceptable.