Hi All,
I've had a stretched left lobe for a while but last year I got my right ear re-pierced as the hole was too close to the edge of my lobe to stretch safely (in my opinion). About 7 months ago, I started stretching this newly pierced lobe, going up a size a month, until I got past 6mm where I had to jump to 8mm.
Everything was going fine, until the other day I tried to change between tunnels of the same size. The hole rapidly started shrinking back down between swapping jewellery, which it hasn't done before and the threaded tunnel didn't want to fasten shut unlike the other did and my lobe became very sore and swollen. I took it back out and put the expander back (which went it ok) in until last night where I cleaned it down with warm salt water and put in a sterilised silicon plug. Even that was sore and looked like there was a little bit of loose crust this morning.
The outer edge of the hole isn't smooth but slightly resembled a cats arse so I became really worried. Both of my stretched lobes look like smooth scar tissue with a vein close to the surface on the inside but now I'm worrying that isn't normal.
I begun stretching my left lobe (which I've been stretching since I was about 13) from 8mm to 10mm and I had no problems, I considered going to 12mm when swapping my right lobe tunnel, but I soon returned back to my 10mm expander.
I'm going to leave my right lobe at 8mm for a good while now to see if that is the issue. This new stretched hole is getting very close to the healed up hole that was pierced wrong when I was young, so I don't know if that is causing any soreness.
Any advice is welcomed!