My Apex Mega Spectrum installs were only swollen a few mm at most last night after the procedure… but as of this afternoon I’ve gotten hit on my left arm pretty good… swelled up like a balloon and zero light is visible from the LED. Both arms have been grabbed and squeezed hard by kids a total of 3 times each… so now both are throbbing and swollen like a cow’s utters waiting in the milking line. My professional suggested removing a single stitch from each and massaging the blood out, but given the shit way I tend to heal these days I am opting to just let it settle on its own.
No heat, no sign of infection, just giant bags of blood under my skin.
What is swelling?
When it comes to the term “swelling”, it is simply describing the inflation of tissues. However it is important to understand swelling and inflammation are not interchangeable terms. My arms are swollen because of blood filling the pocketed void created by the installation procedure. As pressure rises it inflates the tissue, but inside there is just a big sack of blood getting bigger and bigger. This is not the same as inflammation which is an autoimmune response to create a cascade of actions in the different layers of tissue. For my kind of swelling, there is no medication you can take or ice treatment or any of the “traditional ways to treat swelling” because those treatments are aimed at controlling or mitigating inflammation, not giant blood sacks that bring all the mosquitoes to the yard… 
my blood sacks bring all the skeeters to the yard… and they’re like… they bigger than yours… damn right, they bigger than yours… I’ll implant you, but I have to charge
So anyway… when it comes to this kind of thing, all you should really do is wait… just wait. You can try compression or NSAIDS or whatever but it’s not going to do much for you to be honest… and definitely don’t try to drain it as that will introduce the risk of infection into a nutrient rich blood bolus that isn’t moving and will have no flow of white blood cells to counteract any bugs that might be trying to set up shop inside you. Just. Wait.