Chapter One
One day I coma home from a business trip a flight early. I tried to phone my wife as soon as I knew, but she didn’t answer and the machine seemed to be broken. As I walked in I found her and her friend Juanita sitting on some sheets in the living room, surrounded by bits and pieces of plaster. Seeing them I stopped dead in my tracks and so did their conversation, but I caught the last words: “…you ever try to talk to Mike about your fetish for casts? Keep wearing one until he comes home and….” The meaning of these words escaped me for quite some time. I was distracted by my wife sitting on the floor with a cast on her left leg starting just above her toes and ending just below her hip and a cast on her right arm which in included her thumb and her elbow but looked rather mutilated. At first I thought she must have had a rather bad accident, but she never mentioned one during the conversations on the phone we had every other day. I realized that something had to be wrong with these casts as Juanita was in the process of cutting the arm cast off Dianne. Even less understandable was that both turned a bright crimson, which got deeper by the second, as if I had caught them doing something forbidden. The last time I had seen this kind of expression on my wife’s face was, when she was stopped by the highway patrol for speeding. Finally the last words of their conversation fell into place, She didn’t wear these for medical reasons, but just for fun. With this my mind ran off in a completely different direction and got lost in jungle of questions: Why does she wear cast just for fun, where did she get it, was it Juanita’s doing ( a rhetorical question, she is an orthopedic surgeon)? I can’t even remember all those other questions and getting my mind back on track was made even more difficult as both of them recovered from their initial shock and tried to explain everything away. They could have spoken Sanskrit, I didn’t understand one word of their babbling. At first tried to tell me that Dianne had slipped on a banana and broken her arm and her leg and now Juanita was cutting the arm cast off, because it was done wrong and hurt. But if Juanita managed to get a cast saw and plaster from her practice they could have done it there better and easier and wouldn’t have to clean up afterwards. At length the truth came out and it was as I already suspected: my wife loved to be casted just for fun (how this came to be I was told later) and Juanita provided experience and materiel. Dianne used my frequent and lengthy absences to try out different cast and let herself be used as training-dummy for Juanita’s interns and technicians-in-training.
As she went on to talk about the exhilarating feeling of wearing a cast, the incredible freedom she felt, she pulled herself up to the sofa and settled her foot in my lap, Juanita brought some wine from the kitchen. Dianne, who never shied from the spotlight explained, that wearing a cast made her the center of attention everywhere she went. Receiving all those longing stares and looks of pity really excited her. To prove her point she wiggled her toes with their red nails at me, knowing full well how to catch my attention and divert me from any line of thought. Putting her foot into my lap and wriggling her toes made me say yes to anything, which I promptly did. To late I realized, that the wine and her toes made me loose concentration and that I just had accepted to get casted. To get somewhat even I demanded, that Dianne kept hers as long as I wore mine. For this I got a mischievous grin that hinted of better things to come and realized that I couldn’t have done her a greater favor.
It didn’t take Juanita very long to prepare everything necessary, but Dianne was even faster in undressing me down to my briefs for casting despite her casts. It took them both no time at all, to decide that I should get to long arm casts with my hands turned up to make it very difficult for me to do anything on my own (me being at their mercy was what they achieved).
Juanita started to pull stockinet over my left arm, cut out a hole for the thumb and decided to include the thumb into the cast to and added smaller stockinet over the thumb. With a devilish grin she told me that no medically correct cast looked like this but since I wouldn’t go out and she wanted to achieve something other than healing a break this wouldn’t matter. With these words she began to wrap padding around my wrist and thumb and asked me to spread my fingers a little. I wanted to ask her why, but Dianne shut me up with a long and deep kiss. Having finished with the padding Juanita put on some surgical gloves, took the first roll of plaster dipped it in a bowl of water squeezed the excess out. After asking me to hold still since we were entering the final stage of my first recreational casting she started to wrap it around my hand and up my arm. I was a little startled of the warmth the cast created while it settled, but was told not to worry, this was normal and would soon turn to cold and clammy until the cast was completely dry and hard. Juanita added layer after layer of cast to add stability (and weight I thought) until she was satisfied. She did her best to rub the surface smooth, since she wanted us to be comfortable for the next few days. My other arm was padded and casted the same way in almost no time and when she had finished with the second cast she said: “There you are, getting casted isn’t all that hard, is it? Don’t you find your cast captivating? “This provoked a giggle from my wife and an unprintable comment from me. A first careful test proofed that any movement of my fingers and my hands was indeed impossible – being casted is hard and proved to be even harder over the next four days. The cast was indeed captivating, it was absolutely impossible for me to cut it off, I realized belatedly. This must have been the main reason why they choose to cast both my arms.
Chapter Two
During the time it took my first casts to set my wife told me the story of how she became addicted to casts.
It started in College where Juanita was her roommate. One evening both of them sat in a bistro and watched a girl sitting at the bar. This girl, was the center of attention of all male customers even though there were several better-looking girls around (my then future wife and her friend among them). The sole reason was a short walking cast and a splinted wrist. This set Dianne and Juanita of talking about cast and their impact on male hormones. Dianne was envious of the attention this girl was getting and wanted to have at least some of it for herself. She couldn’t imagine how casts made her so attractive that all (well almost all) other girls were ignored by the male community (at least those who didn’t bring male companions). Since both of them were lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) to have never worn or needed a cast, they were also a little curios how it felt to wear a cast.
For Juanita the opportunity the wear a cast (if only for a few hours) arose quite soon after this memorable evening. In one of her classes they were shown how to make a cast and offered the opportunity to cast each other (these are the advantages of medical studies). Since she loved casting and being casted from the first moment she wanted to become good at it (she freely admitted after several glasses of wine that the first cast she did was rather clumsy) and even more important, to share the experience. The ideal partner for casting was her best friend and roommate Dianne. Since they had already discussed the topic of casts Juanita told Dianne about her casting class and the exhilaration she felt when being casted, how this had aroused her and that she wanted to repeat this experience. Since Dianne studied architecture, she couldn’t visit the casting class, so they decided to get the necessary material from the hospital pharmacy and try to cast each other. Their first attempts took place over the weekend and then they hid in their room, since they didn’t want to be seen have to explain the cast to their alumni. But with every cast they made for each other their desire to wear bigger casts for a longer time grew. Since wearing a cast for longer then a weekend means meeting people who will see the cast and most certainly ask questions about it as the fateful evening in this bar had proven, they had to do their casting away from college. Both of them were not prepared to wear a cast for the length of time you usually wear a medical one.
Their first public cast adventure took place during the Easter break, when they took of on a trip along the Mississippi for two weeks. Juanita hobbling along on crutches with a long leg cast and Dianne sporting a long arm cast which included her thumb. The story they told everybody who wanted to know (which was everybody they met) was that they were cycling around on a tandem when a dog (which wasn’t kept on a leash since it was so docile) decided to give them a chase and ended up under their front wheel and sent them flying. After these two weeks there wasn’t any room left on their cast for further signatures or drawings and it wasn’t easy for them to part with their beloved cast before returning to college. They decided to repeat this experience as soon as possible for they wanted to feel it again, this glorious immobility, the feeling of helplessness, the almost sexual sensuousness of the cast. But the feeling of their weakened muscles after two weeks of immobility was something they wanted to experience again, Dianne even more than Juanita who preferred the process of putting others into casts. This went so far, that Dianne bought a used wheelchair at a flea market and demanded to be put in a double-hip-spica, reaching from her toes up to her shoulders. She used the wheelchair to get around in their little flat and did her studies almost completely immobilized. After a prolonged weekend in this “prison”, Juanita had to cut it carefully in halve, so it could be used again. Most of their casts were used this way several times since casts were expensive and this made bigger casts (mostly spicas) faster and cheaper to achieve. This way she spent nearly every weekend till her exams in the hip-spica, wheeling from bed into the kitchen to her study and back again and loving every minute. Since Juanita grew tired of having to spend most weekends in their flat and having to do all their cooking she persuaded Dianne to have some time off from her studies and her wheelchair and spend a weekend in New Orleans and wearing “only” long leg cast. It wasn’t easy to persuade her but after some pleading and a little threatening she agreed. To make her cast last as long as possible, they returned some time after dark and tried to sneak in unseen. Well you guessed right, Dianne ran into trouble as soon as they entered the campus, she was seen by two of her professors and just before entering the safety of her flat also her neighbor. She brushed them all off, mumbling about an accident, being tired and hurting and escaped without having to explain how she got her cast. But there was no way she could avoid their questions the next day and to appear without her cast would make everybody very suspicious. But she realized that this was her opportunity to wear a cast for a long time since she now had no other choice than wearing her cast as long as one usually wore a medical one. This really excited her and made her enjoy preparing the story of her cast. Juanita sobered her a little with telling her, that to stay credible she would have to wear this cast for 8 weeks before graduating to a long-leg-walking cast for another 6 weeks and finally had to spend 4 weeks in a short-leg-walking cast. The next day she told everybody of the mad biker who ran her over in New Orleans and about the 18 weeks she had to wear a cast, thankful that Juanita had provided her with the necessary medical background about casts and fractures. Most of the guys around her were less interested in her story than in scratching her with a ruler whenever she demanded it or wanted to paint her nails. Dianne used her cast to get even with the girl they had seen in the bar where it all began. From the moment she entered the bar she had the attention of every solitary man there, me included. With her decision to take the stool beside me she changed her life and mine. I lost no time chatting her up and monopolized her completely till Juanita complained that she wanted to go home since she had an exam the next day. I think I fell in love with Dianne the moment she took the place beside me, though she never told me until now that this cast was a sham. Since that day we were together every free minute we had, which stopped her career as caster for quite some time but that didn’t matter since I found a lot of things to occupy her time, her mind and her body with, with or later without cast. She also bitched a lot during the time it took her to build the strength of her leg back up. She confessed she took up casting again about three years ago, though she swore to herself she would never wear cast for such a long time that her muscles. “You were lucky you weren’t caught with your double-hip-spica. Then you would have been in trouble, but I’m sure you would have attracted even more male attention. Perhaps Juanita would have fit you with braces to help you back on your feet.” If I had drunk less wine I would noticed Dianne’s eyes going out of focus and her mind switching to overdrive. Only much later I remembered my fateful words, but then it was way to late to stop what I had set into motion.