Sunday, March 30, 2008

I opened the dating site, where my profile has been set to not looking and not subscribing to send messages for months, since I started dating Brenda more regularly. I had it find me some matches, and some of them looked potentially OK, but I realized I couldn’t even get myself to send a message to one of them, and I shut it off again.

I probably do need the counseling, and sooner than I thought.

I distracted myself by reviewing the state of knowledge about the syndrome. There had been a lot of fascinating studies, but they were no longer headline news and I had to go look for them.

The videos of the change were remarkable. The urethra and the cells around it - including the penis in male bodies - survives to the end. Literally the entire body flows through the urethra. At first, it’s only at the pace of regular peeing when peeing is urgent - about a minute to deliver 16 ounces of fluid. After the first minute, when the bladder is emptied, it speeds up. The urethra widens to allow more fluid from the rest of the body to pass. After four minutes, it increases again. In both males and females, the urethra widens to almost the diameter of an erect penis, and the flow is like water from a hose. This change probably caught Brenda by surprise, and she probably struggled to get off at that point, but maybe slipped on the fluid that leaked out, and her struggle only resulted in getting me stuck deeper into her.

It is also at this point that the old body starts to noticeably lose mass, the limbs shrinking first, and then the torso. Inevitably the person loses consciousness around five to six minutes after the start of the process. By eight minutes in, the body is child-sized; by eleven minutes, infant-sized, and the flow begins to slow, but still continues at the rate after the second minute until near the very end, when there’s literally nothing but a shrinking kidney and urethra converting itself to stem cells. Brenda would have been dead already, but in the final minute, what was left of me would have been entirely inside her, continuing to convert my remaining cells to stem cells until I was all gone.

The video isn’t over at this point, as we also see the new body form. Some part of the mass which is most open to the air forms a head first, and almost immediately afterward the lungs and the rib cage form, even if they are constricted and have to form at a reduced size. The stem cells can grow the undersized organs later. There were known cases where the body took over 6 hours to form and still came out right; deaths during change occurred only in people stuck in constricted positions for 8 hours. About 2 or 3 minutes after the head and lungs form, the body becomes conscious, even if incomplete.

One of the questions a lot of people asked was “where does the extra mass go/come from,” as people think women inherently weigh less than men. But this is a misconception, based on the late 20th century ideals of skinny women and muscular men. In fact, if not for different body goals, women only weigh a little less than men on average, and that because they average a little shorter. Pee Body Syndrome sufferers actually weigh the same as male and female. The female body appears smaller, but while the body is slenderer in general, the hips are wider, the bust is larger, and the legs are longer. A very detailed study was done on this, showing that in the long term, a sufferer’s female body has the same volume and mass as his male body. There are changes when it first starts. Those who started out obese lost weight with each change, and tended to reach an average body size after 20 to 40 changes. Those who started very small tended to gain mass, faster or slower depending on how much they ate. And those who started at puberty tend toward an average body size for their age and grow into full size as they age. Or at least they seemed to over the almost two years since this started.

There is usually a small amount of cell mass which doesn’t manage to join up with the body and it dies after a while. In studies, the body turned out OK even if over 20% of the cell mass was lost, and this was again built back by eating more. In such cases the person finds themselves hungrier until the mass is made up. These studies mostly used real-world occurrences, rather than experiments, because there were a small number of us and few if any willing to engage in experiments which might result in their death.

This agreed with my experience. I lost about 5 pounds of my cell mass during the incident with Brenda, but I have already made that up.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

I applied today for the counseling sessions. They only do business hours, so I’m going to have a work-from-home day each week with a break for my session. Work was understanding, especially with my explanation that they would have tried Brenda for rape if she had lived.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Four months now of counseling every Tuesday morning. I guess I knew it wasn’t going to be quick or easy. I’m really tormented by the thought that another woman would try to do the same thing - even though the story, without my name attached, has been circulated widely in news about the syndrome. This was not the first serious crime perpetrated on a changer, nor was I the first one targeted, but I was the only one ever targeted to try to get at the stem cells. The only one ever targeted by somebody who thought they needed stem cells for something without learning enough about stem cells to know they had to be from your own or a closely related person’s cells or they would just be rejected, or themselves reject the body they were in.

The first part of the counseling focused on understanding what my worries were. The situation was complex and there were many aspects that could come into play, but this worry that it could happen again seemed the strongest. So my therapy involved seeing how the knowledge about this incident had become widespread and it was now understood by the general population that trying to take a changer inside yourself while they were becoming stem cells was suicide.

The second anniversary of the change starting also passed recently. Kids are still turning into changers as they reach puberty at a rate of about one every two weeks. No other unexpected changes have happened. Well, there was one recent report. Apparently it had happened two times before but they kept it secret, but they were unable to keep this one secret. A changer was cut in half while in stem cell form, and each half formed a child-sized (but sexually mature) body. Two independent bodies, both with the memories of the person they started as. Potentially, they could have eaten double and maintained their separate selves and grown up to full size, but instead they turned to goo together in a tub and became one again, a single being with memories from both the separate bodies she had one day.

This prompted a dozen others to arrange setups where they could split on purpose, and a variety of other experimentation. Some of them stayed split on purpose, growing both bodies to full size, which introduced interesting legal issues. Two pairs stayed split and limited their consumption to stay child-sized, but varied their change times so that after a week they were out of phase with one another, both pairs rejoining while one was female and one was male, just to see how they turned out. Interestingly, one of the rejoined bodies came out male, one female, so more experiments of this sort are being planned to try to understand what principle governs the sex which dominates in such a case.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Now nine months into counseling. I am not up to dating again yet, but at least my stomach no longer turns at the thought of being alone with a romantic partner.

The splitting has gotten crazy. At least 10% of the original switchers have turned themselves into two full-size copies, typically sending one to work and having the other do chores around the house. Some of them are merging into a mega-sized body once every week or two and then splitting again, to share their memories. The others are typically getting the two bodies out of phase with each other, so that there’s always one male and one female. They don’t share memories in this case, so they still send the same person (half the time male and half female) to work each day. Nobody talks about it, but I think everybody assumes these bodies are having sex. Effectively marrying themselves. I thought about this. There are definitely some advantages, but it would not provide a solution to having kids.

Speaking of which, the legal system decided that because these bodies can always merge and become one again, switchers who split themselves are still legally considered one person, even if they choose to stay apart from one another. This settled some legal issues while opening up new ones. One splitter had sued the government over not having been allowed to have both his bodies vote in the elections last November. This was decided in favor of the government; splitters cannot get extra votes by making extra bodies, and likewise not extra government benefits. If they live apart, they have to pick one legal residence, in the same way that celebrities and some politicians have multiple homes, but one of them is their official residence where they vote, pay taxes, etc. But if one of multiple bodies of a splitter commits a crime, do they all go to jail?

About a dozen switchers are working directly with scientists by splitting. That is, they split, one body goes on living and eats to get back to full size, and the other engages in risky experiments that may kill the body. We don’t know all the experiments they have tried, but they include mixing two half-size bodies’ stem cells together. They refused to mix. In the same way that dirt on the floor doesn’t become part of our bodies and contents from the old body we can’t use crystallizes out into small masses, if your cells get mixed with somebody else’s, they self-separate.

From these experiments, they found that it takes about 45 pounds of stem cells to make a mass that will form a body. This makes one the size of a 6-year-old, but sexually mature, so we were advised to avoid doing this. The half-mass bodies are about the size of an 10- to 12-year-old, and much less disturbing to others. With smaller amounts, the cells start to differentiate but don’t actually go so far as to form organs. They mixed together two bodies from the same person that were in this state and the cells quickly joined with the other like-differentiated cells and completed forming the somewhat below-standard-sized body in only three minutes.

Another of the experiments they told us about was to see how large a person they could make. They had someone reproduce themselves several times and grew all the bodies to full size, then dumped all but one of them together at one change. The largest body they managed to make was about 8 and a half feet tall and 550 pounds. Beyond that, the cells will form one body of this giant stature and if the remaining cells are enough to make another body, they will do so immediately afterward. They thought this said something about how the stem cell mass figures out how much of it there is. In some way, it knows there is “enough” or “too much” to form a body, and it knows how much there is and makes the body of a size to match.

Obviously it’s possible for a human being to be smaller than that; we start out much smaller when we are born. But the stem cells are set into a mode of making an adult body, and preserving all the memories and such, and it makes sense that the minimum size is larger than an infant. Likewise, I can also imagine the problems such a huge body would have. Does it have enough strength to support its own weight? Can the heart pump blood around the whole body? Somehow it figures that is the limit and doesn’t go any larger.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

A little more than a year of counseling now, and I can at least log onto the dating site and look at my matches. But I had second thoughts about the splitting thing.

If I split myself and shift so one is male and one female at any time, we could take turns changing. I’d have one body unchanged to make sure my date isn’t doing anything inappropriate while the other is changing. As much as I’ve tried to convince myself through the counseling that it’s extremely unlikely to occur again, this would give me confidence that I have the ability to prevent it.

I would need to figure out if just one of me is dating her or if we both are. Both cases are weird in different ways, but it’s probably less weird if both of us are, not to mention that I wouldn’t have to do anything special for one of me to be “watching” my date while the other of me is changing. Ideally, then, I’d be looking for female bi poly dates. And, yes, I’m limiting myself again, but hopefully they’ll be very good matches when I find one. But if that doesn’t work out, I’d always have one body of whatever my date wants and we could date her alternately.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I brought this up with my counselor the next two weeks and she agreed that if splitting will make me feel better, even if it restricts my choices, it was better for me to do it. So I started making plans.

To do the actual split, I needed some way to split the liquid evenly. And it turns out that is a hard thing to do, especially considering I am going to be unconscious during more than half the flow. I did find a place where people were discussing splitting online, and they described two basic ways of doing it: The overflow method and the distributor method.

The overflow method was the easier to set up, but you needed to figure out your volume as stem cells. The stem cell mixture was known to weigh about 5% more than water, so while a gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, a gallon of stem cells weighs about 8.4 pounds. A typical person weighing 150 pounds then has a volume of 17.86 gallons as stem cells and wants to split into two parts each taking up 8.93 gallons. To do it, you’d buy a ten gallon bucket from a hardware store (the five gallon bucket is more common, but the ten gallon one is available if you look around, or online), measure out precisely the volume you need of water into the bucket, and then add stones or other heavy items until the water reaches the brim. Then you’d put this in your tub, sit on top of it inside the tub, and pee into it. Eventually, once your body starts to collapse, you’ll fall into the bucket and splash some of the cells out. but the part of your body inside the bucket would pee itself out inside the bucket and it would work. And if the parts weren’t exactly the same size, it doesn’t matter; they only need to be close, as most people let their bodies gradually grow back to normal size.

The distributor method is more complicated but works without knowing your volume. You need something like a large funnel with two outlets. The suggestion was taking something like the five gallon bucket and epoxying two identical plastic funnels to the bottom, making sure they are sealed all the way around the top, and cutting holes in the bottom of the bucket into each funnel. Then you’d mount this so the two funnels lead to different places, such as inside the bathtub and on the floor. And then you’d pee in the bucket. At first, it would flow out as quickly as you filled it, and at that point you’d make sure you were peeing equally into both holes. Later, the bucket would start to fill up as you are filling it faster than the liquid can flow out, and pressure would keep the liquid distributing evenly. Again, you would test it with water to ensure it distributes equally.

I decided the less complicated setup was worth the effort of having to measure my volume. I weigh - I just checked - 158 pounds today, which is about 18.8 gallons, or 9.4 gallons for half of me, so I need a little over half a gallon of stones. I knew how much that is, roughly, from the milk cartons, so I brought in a couple large stones from the yard and several small ones, and washed them off.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Next I needed to plan when I was going to do this, how I was going to manage work while I was regrowing myself, acquiring food - because small me would have a hard time driving! And clothes. I could wear oversized shirts like dresses, which might work for casual stuff but would be weird in the office. I’d need smaller pants under it or just go commando until I could wear my usual ones.

Work turned out to be easy. They told me to take two weeks of work-from-home while I get back to my usual size. So no major issues with clothes.

For food, I decided I was going to stock up. Maybe Friday night I could do a big food purchase, and Saturday morning do my initial split. Further research suggests It doesn’t matter what I eat, as long as human bodies can digest it. Carbs and fats help bulk up best; some proteins are needed but did not have to be the emphasis. So I put on my shopping list large bags of pasta and rice, several loaves of bread, bags of potatoes, way more cereal than I’d normally eat, gallons of whole milk, creamy dressings, etc. I was going to be buying for two of me, and those were each going to need to eat double to restore mass, so the quantities are what I would normally eat in a month. A week later when my supplies were running low, the two of me would be big enough to drive and I could go do it again.

I also should get a stepladder. I sometimes stood on chairs to reach high things in my house and I knew I should have one of those short folding ladders that let you get two feet off the floor to reach those things. With this I was going to be perhaps a foot shorter with no adult-sized person around and likely have even more trouble reaching things. So I made a stop coming home from work to get one of those tonight, along with the bucket.

It turned out, when I measured the one I picked up on the way home from work tonight, that these “ten gallon” buckets are actually a bit over that. They would hold ten gallons - but the measurement to the brim was a bit more. So I needed one more large stone from the yard to make it work. But at the end of the night I had a bucket with the right amount of stones in it, and I put the remaining stones back outside.

Friday, May 29, 2009

On the way home from work, I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a package of men’s briefs in small size and panties two sizes smaller than what my female self usually wore. I didn’t feel right going commando for two weeks, especially with two of my bodies, and I figured these would be close enough until I grew large enough to wear my usual underwear. I added a couple small sports bras for the same reason. I didn’t buy any other clothes. During the time we were mostly staying at home, I’d improvise from among my male and female inventories. Once we were back to full size, my two selves would share my male and female clothes. I might need more of them, but I could easily go buy them when I figured that out.

After that I went grocery shopping with my special shopping list and filled up my trunk with food. I had to improvise on some of the storage, but I found room. Clearly, I was not used to keeping food here for a family of four adults, because that was really all this was.

I put the bucket with its rocks in the tub before bed and put the plug in the tub. Might as well make it as easy as possible in the morning.