Nurse warns against getting piercings at the mall- after teen's ear is EATEN by gruesome bacterial infection

Nurses are sounding the alarm about the dangerous risks of dirty body piercings after a healthy teen had to undergo reconstructive surgery because of a severe complication in her pierced ear. 

Surgeons in New Jersey were forced to cut and drain a pus-filled wound that had developed on a 17-year-old's ear cartilage after she became resistant to antibiotics doctors had initially given her to fight the infection. 

The complication occurred roughly three weeks after she got her piercing, which was performed by an employee at a shopping mall with a piercing gun.

When she finally went to the hospital, the infection had already eaten away a portion of the cartilage in her upper ear. 

Sarah Lacy, a registered nurse and the Associate Director of Piercing Research and Innovation at cosmetic firm Rowan, told DailyMail.com she sees complications like this often - and it is usually because of mistakes made by the piercer.

She said: 'There are a lot of things that can go wrong, you know without proper care... You can end up with anything from a minor infection to something as intense as a huge, huge, huge cartilage-type infection.'

And in serious cases, this can lead to the operating table.  

Complications are more common when someone has been pierced with an earring gun than when someone has been pierced with a hollow needle

Ms Lacy says these problems can be easily avoided with precautions that too few piercers take - and poorly-trained assistants at chain jewelry stores are often to blame.

But some of the poor outcomes are user error.

Common mistakes people with earrings make are not cleaning them often enough, wearing one that is too short and pressing the back of it too closely to the ear, which can cause irritation and embedding. 

Embedding happens when an infection causes the tissue around the earring to swell and 'swallow' it into the ear.

TikTok user hannahbanana81374 shared a video of this disturbing occurrence, writing 'POV: you woke up to find out your ear swallowed your earring.'

Sara Lacy, a registered nurse, now works at Rowan, which is an piercing company that employs nurses to do new earrings

In the video, Hannah shows her visit to the emergency room, where doctors numbed her tissue to extract the earring from inside her ear.

This is the common course of action for an embedded earring, Ms Lacy said. 

Doctors usually use forceps to pull the earring out or make a tiny incision to remove it.

Another culprit for earring mishaps is using the wrong piercing technique - more earrings placed by piercing 'guns' get infected than those that get placed with a hollow piercing needle, Ms Lacy said. 

The Rutgers doctors who operated on the 17 year-old with the cartilage infection noted that 'cartilage, if pierced at all, should be penetrated with sharp, hollow needles, which will core out the cartilage,' not with a gun. 

Using a gun can cause the cartilage to 'crack' and create bleeding that will lead to later complications, they wrote.

Some guns are also reusable- which means the same needle can be used on many people multiple times a day. 

This, according to the Association of Professional Piercers, 'put[s] clients in direct contact with the blood and body fluids of previous clients', which is incredibly unsanitary. 

People at chain piercing salons or malls are often trained to use a gun quickly, and may be too young to really understand the importance of sterile technique. 

Ms Lacy told this website she frequently sees patients who come to her after a botched mall piercing. 

Not everyone with a piercing will experience serious complications, but minor infections are common if you wear the wrong kind of earrings or don't care for your new piercing correctly, Ms Lacy said. 

She advises not sleeping on your new piercing, stressed the importance of cleaning the area regularly to help avoid infection and warned against using earrings with nickel in them.

Most people who use nickel earrings eventually develop a nickel allergy, Ms Lacy said, which can lead to ear irritation and infection.

But, if despite your best laid plans, your ear gets hot, red or swollen, or you notice discharge coming out of it, you might have an infection.  

The 17 year old patient's ear after she had reconstructive surgery, following her severe cartilage infection

If caught early, minor infections are relatively easy to treat. 

Using a warm compress and a cleaning solution, which you can buy at most piercing salons, should be enough to treat them.

But if you don't address it early, the infection can progress and may require a visit to the doctor. 

Ms Lacy told this website one of her patients came to her after getting a piercing at a tattoo shop. 

The pierced area was a big bubble of white pus. 

'It was so bad, I felt horrible for this person. So that was somebody where we were able to say, "hey, you need to go get this looked at right now,"' she said. 

In the worst cases, earring infections can turn into perichondritis, Ms Lacy said.

This is an infection of the ear cartilage that typically has to be treated in the hospital by getting an antibiotic infusion.

Sometimes it can become extreme enough that people need reconstructive surgery, like the 17-year-old girl who was taken for plastic surgery at Rutgers. 

Luckily, within 24 hours of being seen, she began improving, and her ear was saved.

Piercings are incredibly safe when they're done in a sterile environment and taken care of properly, Ms Lacy said. 

As long as you do research beforehand about the piercing studio and make sure you're prepared to take care of it afterward, you should be okay, she added.

In her experience, getting a new piercing can be a fun, celebratory event. As someone who has gotten piercings before, she takes special pride in getting to be the piercer now. 

Ms Lacy told DailyMail.com: 'It's such a privilege to get to do this. It's a fun service too. And we're just, we're so happy that we get to do it.'