Nebraska nurse sisters develop kit to quickly remove body ornaments

10.08.02

By Amy Lorentzen

The sisters giggled as they looked at the body piercings displayed in the pictures on a kitchen table.

They pointed to studs sticking from ears and tongues, the rings stabbed through nipples, eyebrows and noses.

		Sommer Turner gets a piercing removed from her tongue by nurses Crystal Williams-Serrano and Dina Robinson, using tools from their body piercing removal kit. (Bill Wolf)

Crystal Williams-Serrano and Dina Robinson say their photo collection gets a lot of attention, but there's a serious side to why they're interested in piercings.

The two nurses, from ElmCreek, Nebraska,  who have only their ears pierced, know how the bits of body jewelry can be used as weapons. Prison and jail inmates can file the jewelry down and use it against other inmates.

Given the right circumstances, the jewelry can be dangerous. Piercings on an emergency room patient can become critical obstacles for medical personnel.

And it's for that reason Robinson, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in Kearney, and Williams-Serrano, medical supervisor at the Dawson County Law Enforcement Center in Lexington, have created an emergency medical tool kit designed to pluck out piercings in less time than it takes to put one in.

The kits are marketed under a company the sisters recently started called SerRobCo. Inc. -- a combination of their last names.

"There's been this need for so long," Williams-Serrano said.

The kit includes a ring popper for removing earrings, nose, nipple and eyebrow rings; a tongue stabilizer for removing tongue studs and chin and lip piercings; and a ball remover for removing piercings done with a miniature barbell.

There are detailed instructions on how to use each instrument and some baggies to store the jewelry that's removed.

The sisters have turned the small operation into a family business, with help from their mother and Robinson's son, four daughters, and her husband, Brent, who assemble the kits in the den of their Elm Creek home.

		Crystal Williams-Serrano, left, and her sister, Dina Robinson, display the SerRob Co. piercing removal kit at their home-based office near Elm Creek, Nebraska. (Bill Wolf)

The kits, which retail for $135 each, have been on the market for nine months. About 1,000 of them have been sold to customers from California to Connecticut.

If a patient has to be defibrillated, a naval or nipple piercing can cause severe burns as electricity is pumped through the chest. A tongue barbell, made of three pieces -- including two balls which screw on to each end of a cylinder -- can come undone and cause a person to choke. Other rings and piercings can cause complications near injuries that are swollen or bleeding.

Besides emergency rooms, jails and prisons, school nurses and dentists have also found the kits useful. Family practitioners use the tools to remove infected piercings.

"Kids want to have it done," Robinson said, "so they'll do it themselves and they'll need to be taken out."