I want to know if they are any precautions or worries I should know about. I want to get my tounge pierced. Are there dangers I should know about? Is it painful? Will they numb my tounge up? Will they let someone be with me so I can hold their hand (I have pain). What i the procedure? Please tell me anything and everything about it. Thanks!
how’s this for danger?
The first thing to know is how to spell tongue
(Wondering why “tongue” is one of the most frequently misspelled words online.)
Hi there,
The biggest thing I was warned about before hand was the fact that it’s supposed to chip your teeth up royally. Three years later, not a single chip. I tend not to click it around the backs of my teeth though, as I’ve seen some people do.
So far as I know, there aren’t any weird dangers associated with tongue piercing, except you need to be VERY careful when re-learning how to chew that you don’t bite the barbell–you’ll crack a tooth that way.
If it’s done properly, by a competant professional body piercer, it should not hurt at all. When I had mine done, the guy put a clamp type thingie on my tongue as a needle guide and just to hold it still. The clamp wasn’t tight, just enough to keep a grip on my tongue. I remember sitting there with my tongue hanging out and drooling all over the place, heh. He poked my tongue with a toothpick with some dye on it to mark the spot and said “that’s about what it’ll feel like”. “Yeah, right” sez me. But when he went to pierce it, I could feel the needle pressing against the top, and come out the bottom, but it really did not hurt, and I couldn’t feel it actually passing through my tongue at all. I’ve been told that if they get it off center it hurts like a mofo. Go to a professional and competant body piercer.
They shouldn’t need to numb your tongue, unless they hurt a lot of people–which would be a good sign not to go there to be pierced since it means they’re not doing it correctly. Besides, numbing is lame, I think it defeats the entire experience of being pierced.
Back to proceedure. This was three years ago, so I may be a bit shady on the details and other places may do it differently, but from what I recall: he looked at my tongue to make sure it could be placed correctly, had me rinse with listerine while breaking out the autoclave pack, arranged the tools and jewelery, disinfected my tongue with a swabby-thing (that’s a technical term), did the clamp/mark thingie, disinfected again, pierced me, ran the jewellery in from underneath, screwed the ball into the top, and had me rinse again. He changed his gloves roughly 982348923 times during the proceedure.
My tongue swelled up pretty badly for the first 24 hours or so; I sucked on a lot of ice. You have to pack around a water bottle of a 50/50 listerine and water solution for like two weeks to rinse with any time you put anything into your mouth: food, drink, smoke, whatever.
The piercing barbell is pretty long to accomodate the swelling, and I went in about six weeks later and had it replaced with a shorter one.
I had to re-learn how to chew (hint: avoid spaghetti and ramen for the first couple days) and pretty much just ate soup or soft, squishy stuff for the first two or three days. Also had to re-learn how to pronounce the letters “g” and “j”. No noticable speech impediment now, though. 99% of people don’t even notice I have one unless I stick my tongue out at them.
If you have any other questions, let me know.
Peace,
~mixie