All looking good

Seven weeks on from my hip replacements, I went to the Hospital this morning to get them checked over.  The physio looked at the scars, got me to do a few test exercises, and then invited me to have a look at my X-Rays.  I'm not really a connoisseur of X-Rays, but the 'before' ones definitely looked to me like a mass of solid bone which had seized up virtually solid, in contrast to the one they took the following day, with the metal joints showing up just like they do in a medical textbook.  What also showed up quite clearly and distinctly, being metal, were my PA and foreskin piercings!

Being the exhibitionist that I am, I couldn't resist saying, "Ooh look..." simply because it hadn't occurred to me they would be visible, but how you could take an X-Ray of the pelvic area without something like that showing visibly is of course almost impossible if you think about it.  Perhaps a bit strange that nobody wondered what they were, but then again I daresay radiographers at least must have seen them before.

I asked how long it would be before I could bend and tie my bootlaces myself, and he said it was just a matter of time and practice, and that it was as much a muscular exercise as anything else.

Pleased as Punch, I left my crutches behind for use of the next patient, and made my way home on the bus, no longer having to sit in the seats at the front specially reserved for those with 'impaired mobility'.  Get as much exercise as you can, he'd said, so I even toyed briefly with the idea of getting another dog. 

Finita, la commedia

I was greatly saddened to learn of the death, over the weekend, of someone I greatly admired and respected - Shannon Larratt, founder of BME.  Coincidentally, it's almost exactly three years ago that I started off this blog with a short entry outlining some of the background to my involvement with BME and although I haven't been a contributor there since that time, I look back on those eleven years with nostalgic affection.

I was fortunate enough to have met Shannon in person one time when he visited the UK, and although I can't say we were close friends or anything, I flatter myself to think that he used to value my contributions to the site.  His encyclopaedic knowledge of Body Modification was equalled only by his ability to express it in a way which was always informative, interesting and captivating.  It's typical of him, I think, that he managed to write his own obituary so very eloquently: goodness alone knows how long it must've taken him to do it, wracked with the constant pain of such an increasingly degenerative condition.

I don't have any hesitation in saying that had it not been for his inspiration I'd never have become involved in the world of Body Modification to the extent that I did, and for that I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.

Requiescat in pace.

A year in the life.....

It's a year (plus a few days, but who's counting?) since I started writing this blog. So today I re-read my final entry on my BME/IAM page, which was more or less the catalyst for starting this one. I still have my tattoos and my piercings, and I'm proud of them. They're part of what I am and I wouldn't have missed the experience of being part of that special community for the world: I'm not sure I can properly describe the part it all played in my development as a person.

But a year later, I look back - with affection - and I move on. I don't want to go back and re-involve myself in it, any more than I want to go back and re-live any other aspect of my childhood or adult life. I take the things I learned, the things I enjoyed, the memories I have... and I treasure them. I say goodbye to the friends I left behind, some of whom had already moved on and found different directions in their lives even before I did. New members have already taken their place, and mine too. I wish them, and the site, well: if they're half as happy belonging to the community as I was, then their lives will be fuller and richer for it.

Old chestnuts

A news article today resurrects the age-old argument about tongue piercings being bad for your teath, citing "research" carried out at the University of Buffalo and reported in the Journal of Clinical Orthodontics. All sounds very authoritative, but whatever the research consisted of, it hasn't discovered anything new - the claims of tongue piercings damaging teeth have been doing the rounds for as long as the piercing itself has, certainly for as long as I can remember, anyway.

It's fairly self-evident that if you deliberately scrape a metal object against your teeth, then sooner or later it's going to wear the enamel away: that is, after all, the whole principle on which a dentist's drill works! More spurious is the claim that "constant pushing of the stud against the teeth - every day with no break - will move them or drive them apart" You don't do this naturally, not with a standard centre tongue barbell, any more than you suck your thumb or a dummy constantly. And with more of an eye on the sensationalism than the facts, the author of the article couldn't resist the temptation to mention the alleged link to brain abscesses - an extremely rare and unlikely complication, especially when compared to the many thousands of tongue piercings performed safely and successfully every year.

My tongue piercing is now nearly ten years old. Most of the time I'm not really aware of it: it doesn't cause me any trouble. I've had my fair share of teeth problems and expensive dentistry, but that's more or less entirely down to lapses in teeth brushing and deficiencies in general oral hygiene!

Boo-hoo, I lost my ball!

I made an unwelcome discovery on Monday: a ring glistening up at me from the bath! I knew straightaway that I'd lost a piercing, and also that I wasn't sure which one. It turned out to be my cartilage ring. The ball at some point must have worked loose or been caught on something, and - free to rotate - the ring had simply fallen out. I guessed it had happened some time over the weekend, and therefore there was still a chance of saving the piercing: I'd had it about eight years, and it had been a fairly painful, troublesome one to heal, so I didn't really want to lose it!

So on Tuesday morning I gathered up my free Centro travelpass and took the train into Birmingham. I headed straight over to Modern Body Art, fully prepared to have to go through the hassle of having it re-pierced or at least tapered open again. But no worries: a very friendly piercer (whose name I forgot to ask) sat me down on a bench, reinserted the ring without so much as a twinge of pain and secured it with a new ball in a matter of a couple of minutes.

Since I was wearing a sleeveless top, he spotted my BME tattoos, and we exchanged notes about how sadly the site had declined of late. Since I "left" almost two months ago towards the end of March, I've visited occasionally, but I'm afraid I've seen nothing to tempt me back. Shame, really, especially considering what it once was, but nothing lasts forever.

What price privacy?

I had my attention drawn over the weekend to this news article concerning an allegedly illegal surgical procedure carried out in what appeared to be a piercing/tattoo studio. One of the questions it raised in my mind straightaway was who the anonymous 'mole' was, and the same question has since stirred up something of a hornets' nest, as only a small handful of people would have had access to the original videotape.

Over the course of the last eleven years I've had somewhere in the region of a couple of dozen genital piercings performed, a few of which of which I still have, and because I had many of them done in the company of like-minded friends, I had pictures taken of them, and submitted them to BME. All except one I think are disembodied shots of male anatomy which could belong to anyone, but on one memorable occasion after I had a guiche done, the piercer grabbed the camera and took a shot of me with a huge grin on my face displaying his handiwork! I'm not going to re-post it here. Not because I'm ashamed of it, I'm not. Nor because it depicts anything illegal, it doesn't. It's simply that, taken out of context, at best it's just going to titillate and at worst possibly shock the unsuspecting viewer.

This brings me to my main concern. Whenever I've been photographed doing something incriminating - be it just potentially embarrassing (say if my employer had discovered it), or actually illegal (and I don't think there is anything that falls into that category) - I've taken a risk. In my case the risks were fairly minimal, but they're there all the same. My privacy, in terms of who can see what I get up to, is important to me and while whatever is posted on the Internet is always liable to be illicitly downloaded, copied and circulated for a purpose other than that for which it was intended, the principle of safeguarding hidden identity should be both paramount and sacrosanct.