Memorable Experience

By Stephanie Costantino  

When someone is asked to deliberate on a memorable experience, there are a series of different emotions that may be provoked: Sadness, glee, melancholy, and merriment. For Alison Merrits, the emotion she remembers is fear. 

When I asked Alison, an 18-year-old student at Boston University, to tell me about a memorable experience in her life, she paused for a moment and pondered. Suddenly, her eyes widened as it dawned on her what she would tell me about. “I got an earring stuck in my piercing hole and a lizard doctor had to pull it out,” she said. “That was memorable. And slightly terrifying.”

Confused and perplexed by her statement, I asked her what exactly she meant by “lizard doctor.” She then explained how it came to be that a scientist who specialized in lizards found himself probing her ear lobe to retrieve an earring that had somehow gotten stuck inside.

“I was about 10 years old at the time,” Alison told me. “I think it was 5^th grade. In 4^th grade, I got my ear pierced for the first time.” She explained to me that after getting her ear pierced, the piercers gave her a standard sized earring, and over time she was instructed to remove the standard size and gradually keep switching into smaller sizes until her piercing was fully healed and ready for a normal sized earring.

“So, in 5^th grade I went on vacation to the British Virgin Islands. My family friend lived on an island called Guana, and the island was holding some sort of scientists’ convention. There were lots of different types of scientists, specializing in birds, or agriculture, and then there were a few who specialized in lizards.

“One night while I was there, I decided it would be a good time to finally switch my earrings. I hadn’t been keeping up to date like I was instructed to, and I’d never taken my earrings out since I got them pierced a year prior. So I put in an earring that was much smaller than I was used to. I went to sleep with the earring on, and when I woke up I felt a horrible pain in my earlobe. I felt around my lobe and realized my earring had somehow got embedded inside, and immediately started freaking out,” she recalled.

“My mom rushed me outside and there was a scientist there, the one who specialized in lizards. He told me he could get it out; he just had to get his tools. He grabbed something that he said he used to probe lizards, and stuck it inside my lobe. After pushing and jerking it around inside my lobe, he reached the earring and applied pressure to it, and it popped out into my hand.”

After cringing at her story myself, I asked her how she felt after the earring had popped out. “Relieved,” she said, sighing, as if she were reliving the moment all over again. “It was definitely terrifying as a ten year old to have something stuck inside of you, and especially strange to have a man who works with lizards helping you to get it out. But it makes for a great story.”