Question: What was your most painful piercing to receive?
Answer: When I read your question, my brain split it into three directions, so I offer each answer in turn.
Literal (meaning what I think qualifies by what I consider painful): My left earring. I never put it back in after chemotherapy, so it has been gone for awhile. It was the first one ever and was done at a mall pagoda type set-up sometime in the early nineties. You know, a gun pointed at my head launched a sharpened spike of metal at my earlobe at approximately one hundred miles per hour. It was more painful, caused more swelling and irritation than any other piercing I have had.
Figurative (what I think most other folks consider to be painful): Of all of my body piercings (as in, those done specifically at a piercing parlor or the early predecessor there of…), none of them hurt me as I see it. I experienced them by intensity, but not pain. I think most other people mix this intensity in with their sense of pain, but I experience them separately. Of them, the nipple piercings were most definitely the most intense. The prince albert was intense but not overwhelming at all. The labret was mildly intense, but I think mostly due to the tugging involved on the lower lip to get the piercing through. The septum, that one was curious. It is where I learned the importance of breathing through a piercing. I didn’t even realize he had it through my nose…!
And the last…
Abstracted (where I went in the range of puncturing my flesh as a whole): Hands down over all the rest…. A lumbar puncture (as in, spinal tap). I had eight in three months during chemotherapy and emotionally, they stacked up on each other cumulatively. Each one more difficult to bear; each one more painful to recover from. It. Sucked.
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