Originally posted on Multiple Sclerosis News Today

About a year after I was born, my parents decided to get my ears pierced. Little did they know, it would become an obsession of mine years later. But little did I know, my piercings would pose problems when it was MRI time.

When I was 13, I continued getting piercings, a trend that progressed as the years went on. Four years later, around the time I was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, I had my first brain MRI to check for lesions. My piercings weren’t a big deal at the time because they had all healed and it was easy to remove the earrings. (For MRIs, jewelry can’t be magnetic.) But the number of piercings I had increased during college, which started to cause problems when I had to get MRIs.

I’d wait until the very last minute to remove my jewelry, even though I knew it would be hard to do because some of the piercings were still healing. For instance, moments before my parents took me to get an MRI one day, I was stressed and frantic because I couldn’t remove one of my earrings. My hands were sweaty and I couldn’t properly grasp it.

I had to rely on my dad to help me take it out. As he removed it, I instantly became dizzy and almost passed out due to the sensitivity of healing piercings. After this experience, I told myself to stop getting piercings because MRIs were an annual requirement. But I didn’t listen to myself, and now have 17 piercings.

Before my last MRI, I had a moment to myself and decided I needed to figure out how to prevent some of my newer piercings from closing. So I revisited my friend Google and did some research on jewelry that is MRI-safe. I stumbled upon a pack of MRI-safe jewelry of various sizes and shapes on Amazon. Since then, it has become a necessary part of any MRI I have, because it eliminates my worries about piercings closing or becoming irritated.

I know the simple answer is to stop getting piercings. But they are a part of my self-expression, and I want to take care of them as best as I can. Whenever I want to get another one, I have to time it to accommodate my yearly brain MRI.

Before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), I didn’t think too much about piercings. But this is one example of the small aspects of life with MS that are altered just a little bit.