Serpentitis Pt. 01

Carson sat down at his desk, and was unwrapping his lunch when his phone rang. Tapping the button on his keyboard, the screen popped to life, revealing the haggard visage of his caller.

"Yes?" he said, as he stuffed a quarter of his sandwich into his mouth. The face on the screen was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it off hand.

"Dr. Carson, I don't know if you remember me. I came to see you a few years ago, about serpentitis?" Carson's bushy eyebrows shot up: now he recognized the face.

"Just a second" he said, as he rolled his chair back and flipped the office door closed. Returning to the desk, he said "Johnson... Andrew, right? What can I do for you?"

Johnson half-smiled at being recognized. "I was just calling to ask you about..., well, did they ever figure out what caused it?"

Carson leaned forward, closer to the screen, and lowered his voice. "Well, here's the story the CDC finally pieced together. A biotech company just outside Boston was doing functional genomic research. What they were doing was, they'd take a human gene, and a rat promoter region, and splice them into a viral vector, like a gene-therapy setup. The gene would encode a human protein, one where the function hadn't been identified, and the promoter would cause the protein to be expressed in a rat. They made thousands of different constructs randomly, and then put them into rats. As far as they could tell, someone handling the rats became infected, and spread the infection to a number of people. Several hundred men apparently came down with it, altogether. The gene was later discovered to be a homeobox gene, which is a gene that controls body proportion and shape during development. The promoter turned out to be the rat testosterone receptor, which was completely functional in humans."

Johnson scowled a second, digesting the unfamiliar terminology. "So, it was a human gene, but you caught it like a cold?"

"Well, pretty much. The vector, or carrier, that the company used was a mildly infectious virus that normally causes colds. It was modified so that it wasn't supposed to be able to infect humans, but their stock strains had reverted at some point, and they hadn't checked its infectiousness rigorously."

Johnson nodded. "So, could you catch it over and over again, like a cold?"

Carson dismissed the idea. "No, you don't actually get the same cold repeatedly: you might get a cold from one adenovirus, and then get another cold from a different strain of adenovirus, but you'd be immune to the first strain. Your body develops an immunity - that's how you get over the cold in the first place. Your immune system keeps a special form of the same immune cells on tap, essentially for the rest of your life. That way, the next time you encounter that infectious agent, your body can mount an immediate immune response, and the infection never gets started the second time."

Johnson nodded, "But don't some people get the same thing twice. Like, don't some people get chickenpox twice?"

Carson grudgingly admitted, "Well, sometimes. It's pretty rare. It could happen if you've gone through chemotherapy, which wipes out your immune system, or even if you're exposed to a large source of infection at a time when your immune system is depressed. Some medications can do that, or exhaustion. Why?"

Johnson now looked concerned. "OK, and if someone caught serpentitis twice, what would happen?"

Carson snorted. "He'd be fucking elephants! Sorry. Everyone who caught the virus seems to have grown in length by a factor of two to two and a half, with a concomitant increase in girth. Basically, they all ended up between 12 and 15 inches long, depending on how long it took them to get over the infection, and how long they were to begin with. As soon as your immune system kicked in, it shut down the protein production, and the growth stopped."

"You said, 'and how long they were to begin with...'"

"Yes, guys who said they were longer to begin with appear to have grown proportionally. Of course, we didn't have any 'before' measurements - only their word to go on. But most of the guys who said they started out around 6-1/2 to 7 inches ended up around 14-15 inches, and most of the guys who said they were 6 inches or smaller ended up closer to 12, unless they were infected for a particularly long time. If someone caught it twice, say starting with 12 inches, they'd probably end up with something like two to three feet."

Seeing the concern on Johnson's face, Carson continued "Say, you look like you could use a checkup. Would you like to make an appointment to come in?"

Johnson was nodding. "Oh, and what happened to the biotech company?"

Before Carson could answer, Johnson's girlfriend (wife?) appeared on the screen. "What are you doing out of bed? You need your rest, Andrew." With that she smiled at the screen impishly, said "Excuse me", and terminated the call.

* * * * * *

Carson sat back, startled. "What happened to the biotech company, indeed." Well, that was one question he would rather not answer at the moment.

His half-eaten sandwich forgotten on his desk, he leaned back and replayed in his mind the story of his own bout of serpentitis. Years ago, when this began, he was already an established urologist in Boston, practicing in a small but well-respected clinic. Several men had come to see him, including Johnson, complaining of unexpected sudden growth. Well, "complaining" wasn't really the term for it: mainly, they came in because they thought they might have some weird form of cancer, or because their wife or girlfriend were concerned they wouldn't stop growing. Each had complained of having a severe cold just before the growth started, or even during it. Carson wondered how many men around Boston had caught this "cold", and didn't bother to mention it. Come to think of it, Johnson was still suffering from the cold when he came in, coughing and hacking all over the examination room. It was probably Johnson who passed it to me to begin with, thought Carson.

Of course, the very idea of a cold that made one's penis double in length was utterly ridiculous, and at the time Carson could think of no possible explanation for such growth. The first patient he sent home with his girlfriend with instructions to measure length and width when erect, and to repeat the measurements daily for two weeks. He didn't expect to find any change, but thought that the exercise would at least relieve the patient's concerns that he was still growing. Frankly, the only explanation he could think of was some form of possible psychological error, or perhaps an odd neurological problem. Within a week, however, four more patients had come in with the same story, and the same "symptoms." All proved to be obviously well-equipped on examination, and all reported measurements in the 12-15" range, with the aid of wives or girlfriends. Carson had been pondering these results when he came down with a cold himself.

When he got home that night, his wife Virginia immediately put him to bed, telling him that he'd finally worked himself into a frazzle, and was going to stay in bed until *she* let him out. Virginia was a head nurse, and there was no arguing with her. Carson had gone to bed, slurped down the chicken noodle soup she brought, and promptly fell asleep.

The next morning, she looked at him, checked the whites of his eyes, and pronounced him unfit to stand. She brought him a light breakfast, and left him a light lunch before going off to a busy shift at the hospital. Carson, feeling quite groggy, tired, and aching all over, did not object. He managed to telephone the clinic, and had his appointments cleared or shifted to one of the other two doctors. Then, he spent the rest of the day, and the following day, eating (he was surprisingly hungry), trying to blow out the prodigious quantities of mucus his sinuses were generating, sleeping, and watching daytime television (which was actually less satisfying than just sleeping).

On the third (maybe the fourth) morning, he had been awakened by Virginia shoving his shoulder and demanding "Robert! Who are you dreaming about?"

Still groggy, Carson mumbled a "what are you talking about?"

Virginia pointed down at the tented sheets, and said "That! I wake up next to you, and you've got a regular tent pole."

Carson mumbled "Morning wood, we've gone through this before. Doesn't mean I was dreaming anything."

"But it's never been like that before. You look huge! Who were you dreaming about?"

Carson finally flipped the sheets down, and discovered that he was, in fact, huge. In a moment of understanding, he suddenly believed all of his recent patients. "Honey, go get a tape measure, please?"

Harumphing, Virginia slid out of bed and stalked off down the hall to fetch the cloth tape measure from her sewing kit. At 35, he still found her a knockout. Watching her stride out of the room naked, her full breasts bouncing with every stride, made him begin to throb.

Returning with the tape, she held one end against his pubic bone, and ran the length along his length. "Robert, I'm sure you weren't 10 inches long before", she said, her voice changing to puzzlement. "How did this happen?"

Carson recounted the stories of the patients he'd seen the previous week. All the while, Virginia ran her hand lightly up and down his shaft, keeping him hard. She could barely get her fingers all the way around. "So what is this, the 'big dick virus'?" she asked when he'd finished.

"No, I think we'll have to call it something less obvious. Macropenes carsonii?"

"Yeah, right" she replied, "How about 'redwoodus giganticus', or 'serpentitis'?"

The latter name had stuck.

She slid into bed with him, then straddled him and ran her full, hanging breasts on either side of his shaft, now twitching with his pulse. "Well, we should try this out while you have it" she said with a wink. "Let's see if I can make it any bigger..." and then proceeded to run her tongue up and down his length and around the head. After several minutes, she crammed the entire head into her mouth, and began slowly sliding the head and next few inches of shaft in and out, applying pressure with her tongue to the sensitive spot on the underside next to the head. He was rock hard a few minutes later when she suddenly stopped, whipped out the tape measure, and pronounced him 11" long. Throwing the tape measure off the bed, she lay down next to him, yanked his should toward her so that he was facing her, and carefully began to shove him into her hot, wet snatch. When he had started to get up, to move on top of her, she stopped him with a hand on his chest: "Not until we're used to this. I want to be able to move back if it gets... too tight." He wasn't used to screwing while lying on his side, but didn't have any trouble with it. Even though he was still pretty groggy, and wasn't applying his usual energy and finesse, he could tell that Virginia was very turned on. A very slow and leisurely lovemaking session, it seemed to go on for hours, ending with a very satisfying explosion.

Virginia got up quickly to get ready for work. While she was in the shower, Carson had thought through the implications. This has commercial potential, he realized. Hawking wads of phlegm into a tissue, he dumped out a pill bottle and inserted the wadded tissue. As Virginia was about to dash out the door, he gave her the pill bottle in a bag, and handed her a note with an address. "Here, please drop this off with Ron Archer. Tell him I think there's a new virus in it, and that I need it cultured and sequenced. Tell him to keep it strictly confidential, and to treat it as extremely contagious.... And don't tell him that I have it."

She looked worried "Is this serious?"

"No, it's a potential opportunity. We'll talk about it tonight." Then he went back to bed.