Amanda the Balloon Girl

It was my first day at Gremlin's toy shop. I had always wanted to work with children, so this was a big thing, and even though I was going to have to start at the bottom doing menial and probably humiliating tasks I was really looking forward to it.

I was now sitting in an ancient-looking, clean but dimly-lit wood-panelled room with an antique looking oak desk behind which sat an antique looking oak gentleman in a tweed suit. This contrasted with the public part of the shop, which was trendy and modern, all chrome and glass with the latest gadgets for children everywhere.

"Welcome Amanda, I hope you enjoy your first day. You know, we're all one big, happy family here and I'm sure you'll fit in well."

Everything about the man, including his upper class tones and demeanour indicated that he was clearly used to an earlier, more paternal age of employee relations. I was a little worried that he would have similarly outdated attitudes to younger female staff, but was still very much anticipating a fun day on the bottom rung of the ladder. I spoke up.

"What would you like me to do first, sir?"

"Oh no, no, no, let's not worry about all that formality. Call me Mr Derbyshire if you like."

"All right then, er, Mr Derbyshire. Thank you very much."

"Now I realise you must be feeling rather nervous today, but I'm sure you know it's important to prove that you're willing to turn your hand to anything that might need doing, and put the shop's needs first when you're here. So long as you understand that, we won't go far wrong. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Mr Derbyshire."

"First of all, I must say you are very well turned out today in that blouse and skirt, but I'm afraid that, just for today, we're going to want you to wear something different, something more appropriate for what you're going to be doing. How do you feel about that?"

Actually, I wasn't that happy about it but I'd have to see. I'd put quite a lot of effort into my appearance this morning, and now I was going to have to change it, and in particular I was very nervous about doing anything which would draw attention to myself.

"Well, er, I'm happy to oblige. What would you like me to wear?"

"Let me explain first of all, that this morning you're going to be in the front window arranging our new display. We're not expecting you to do anything too mind-taxing, but you know how keen children are on toy balloons."

"Of course, sir."

"Right then, so what we thought you might do is arrange a window display of helium party balloons. How does that seem to you?"

"It makes a lot of sense. I can see you've thought this through, Mr Derbyshire."

"Indeed we have. We put a lot of work into our displays you know Amanda, and we exercise a lot of attention to detail."

He pressed a button on the intercom on his desk.

"Mrs Pyle, I believe our new shop assistant is ready for you now. Please come in."

The door opened, and a woman in her late forties in a black skirt and formal jacket with a white blouse bustled in. It was impossible not to notice that she was also very overweight, which embarrassed me. She must have been aware that the first impression everyone received of her was this, and so she must also know that this was in my thoughts now.

"This is Mrs Pyle, our floor manager. She'll show you to a changing room where you can put on your costume."

Costume? My uncertainty must have shown on our face, as Mrs Pyle spoke immediately.

"Don't worry Amanda, it'll be OK. Just you come with me." Her voice was deep and fruity, as befitted her shape.

I stood up and left the room with her, bidding goodbye to Mr Derbyshire. She quietly closed the door behind her and we started to make our way down a carpeted and panelled corridor.

"Right Amanda, now I think I should point out that this morning is more a test of your willingness to do anything for us while you're working here. We won't be expecting you to do anything quite so - how shall I put it? - attention-grabbing under normal circumstances, but I'm afraid that for today only your attire is going to be rather ostentatious. If you could just step into this changing room, take your clothes off and put on what you find in there, that'd be great."

We had reached a dark red curtained alcove into which I stepped. In the cramped space inside, I saw myself in the full length mirror: wavy blond shoulder length hair with telltale brown eyebrows and eyes with high cheekbones and a delicate nose. I still wasn't too sure about having bleached my hair. It might draw more attention to me than I really wanted. I took my pink blouse and black skirt off along with my court shoes, but left my underwear on. I left on the bra that covered my rather small breasts that secretly I was relieved weren't larger as I didn't want men to look at me too much. Actually, big breasts would have looked odd on such a skinny body. Then I looked at the garment hanging from the coat hanger to my left. Oh dear.

I fetched it down with some trepidation, and the usual hop I needed to perform due to my diminutive height. It was a catsuit apparently made of bright red rubber, clearly intended to resemble a balloon. I climbed into it to find that it was made in two layers. The inner one was actually a spandex catsuit with sleeves and legs, but the torso also had an outer layer in the form of a sleeveless leotard made of rubber, also lined on the inside with rubber. It had the unmistakable odour of balloon rubber, and felt quite tight and constricting on my body, squashing me together inside due to its elasticity.

"Are you ready now Amanda?"

Well, here goes then, I thought, and emerged, feeling a little self-conscious already.

Mrs Pyle looked at me.

"We're not quite ready yet I'm afraid. I'm sure you realise you're supposed to look like a balloon, so what I'm going to do now is inflate your suit with this footpump."

She whipped out a pump whose hose she screwed into an attachment at the bottom of my left hand side, and started pushing away hard, using her weight to full effect, pumping my suit up with air. I was going to have to go out into the shop window in this bright scarlet catsuit looking like a giant fully-inflated balloon! As she pumped away, the suit began to swell and I felt it squeezing me harder and harder. As time went by, the suit slowly got rounder and bigger, and started to push my arms up and my legs apart. After a couple of minutes, she was finished, unscrewed the nozzle and closed the valve. Now the suit was well-inflated. I could see wrinkles down the seams at the sides until they vanished from sight around the curve, and had to force my arms down to prevent them being pushed up diagonally, and squeeze my legs together to stop them from being forced out sideways. I couldn't actually see my legs and my head was sitting in the middle of a rubber cushion of air which curved out in front of me. To be honest, it was even difficult to turn my head enough to see either arm.

"All right then Amanda, now I'd like you to make your way through the shop to the front window by the High Street. When you get there you'll find a helium canister and some party balloons, which I'd like you to inflate and tie up, and I'd like half on the floor and half on the ceiling. There's a ladder so you'll be able to reach."

I started to walk out of the corridor and head for the window. I was immediately aware of how difficult it was to walk because my arms and legs were splayed out by the pressure inside my balloon suit, and also how careful I had to be to avoid knocking toys off the shelves with my unaccustomed bulk. This would be second nature for Mrs Pyle. Luckily though, the shop was almost empty because it had just opened. I managed to struggle across the store to the window making a constant squeaking noise and having my legs spring apart from each other with every step. By the time I reached the shop window, I was not just red in the face from embarrassment but also from exertion struggling against the air pressure in my balloon costume. How could I be expected to set up a window display wearing this?

The window compartment contained a ladder, lots of uninflated balloons, some string and a canister of what was presumably helium. Unfortunately, the balloons were lying all over the floor rather than somewhere I could easily reach. I was going to have to struggle hard against the air just to bend over enough to reach the balloons. Being the height I was, it would be particularly hard for me to pick them up with my short arms. I started to bend over against the resistance of the balloon surrounding my torso and was confronted with more squeaking and creaking noises and the appearance of a horizontal crease roughly where my waist ought to have been. As soon as I paused, my suit sprang back up into a spherical shape and I had to start again. I was certainly going to have to work hard to earn my wages today!

I decided to lean against the ladder and gradually scoot my legs backwards so that I could gradually manoeuvre myself into a position diagonal enough to reach my arm down and grab a balloon. I was nearly there. Closer...closer...there was a pink balloon just beyond the reach of my fingers. It had also been a considerable effort to bend my arm far enough down to reach the floor. Just a few centimetres more. I shifted my feet just slightly backwards...

Suddenly I shot forwards and toppled onto my front. I wobbled up and down for a while before coming to rest, squashing the front of my catsuit somewhat, but the front of my body was still about thirty or forty centimetres above the floor and my weight had forced the air outwards so that my limbs were now splayed out in an X shape out of reach of the ground. With considerable effort, I bent my left arm down to the floor and managed to scoop up a dozen uninflated balloons. By now, I was sweating and hot from the effort. How was I going to get back into a standing position? My right hand was in reach of the ladder, so I clasped one of its legs and hoisted myself up again, incidentally twisting my body round so that I was facing away from the window. I finally got back into a vertical position, and became aware of a muffled murmuring coming from outside. I swivelled round to face the window.

I felt my face go hot and a startled lurch in my stomach as I blushed to the roots of my hair and my face must have become the same hue as my ballooning catsuit. There was a considerable crowd of people standing right outside the window smiling, pointing and talking to each other about me and my predicament. I was like a comedy act to them, a thing of ridicule, and they had all seen my entire struggle to do anything at all in this humiliating costume. This had now definitely become the most embarrassing day of my life.

I waddled over to the helium cylinder and placed the mouth of the first balloon over its nozzle, clutching the bunch of uninflated balloons in my other hand. After a very self-conscious few seconds of fiddling, I realised that the canister would release gas through the nozzle if I pressed the balloon down firmly onto it. The first balloon filled with gas painfully slowly. I felt an ever-increasing number of pairs of eyes boring into the back of my head as I waited for it to fill. Finally the balloon was fully inflated. The next step was to bring my arms together closely enough to tie a knot in the neck of the balloon. With considerable effort, I reached around the bulk of my inflated suit to bring my hands close enough together to tie the first balloon, and finally succeeded after three attempts. I am actually no good at tying balloons in the best of circumstances, and it was all I could do to stop it from flying off into the shop, but I did manage to tie it after a short while. I then picked up the scissors, which were lying on the stepladder next to the ball of string, and cut myself a length of string to tie to the balloon. Luckily, I could do this with one hand. I then taped the string to the floor beside the edge of the window. All of this was accompanied by the squeaking and groaning of my protesting balloon costume. Right. That was one balloon done. How many more to go?

As the morning wore on, the crowd grew and I got more and more self-conscious, and therefore ever clumsier, but I did discover the control knob on the side of the cylinder nozzle, so I turned it full on in order to inflate the balloons as fast as possible. As time went by, it occurred to me that I might be able to let some of the air out of the suit, and struggled to reach the valve, but as it was way down on my left hand side over my hips, this was impossible. It was all I could do to stop accidentally on purpose stabbing the suit with the scissors. However, I eventually got about twelve balloons standing proudly up on strings across the front of the shop.

Then, two things happened. The helium cylinder and the balloons I had collected both ran out. In a repeat of the earlier performance, this time accompanied by hysterical laughter from the crowd, I fell over, scooped up another handful of balloons and got myself back into a standing position. What was I going to do now, with no helium left?

I decided the best approach would be to blow the balloons up by mouth. This involved a different struggle, lifting the balloon to my lips and blowing, and it was not an insignificant effort to inhale enough to inflate the balloon significantly, what with the pressure on my chest. After I'd done another twelve, I was feeling dizzy and spaced out. The other problem was that the window display was now carpeted with air-inflated balloons which tended to get underfoot.

Mrs Pyle then came in.

"All right, Amanda, how are you doing now?"

She looked at the carpet of balloons.

"Sorry Mrs Pyle, I ran out of helium."

"Oh, I see. Well, you're doing quite well, but I'm afraid you need to inflate quite a few more balloons and maybe stick them up at the top of the window. You also need to use helium still so they don't fall down easily. The ladder's for reaching the ceiling you know. What I'd like you to do now is to fetch another helium cylinder from the store room. Just go down in the basement by the service elevator and you'll find it clearly marked. I'll wait here for you."

I felt stupid for not remembering that I was supposed to be sticking the balloons on the ceiling as well. For a second time, I made my way across the shop, but this time it was crowded with shoppers, many of them pointing and making comments about my apparently amusing appearance, a joke which had worn thin very quickly for me. Due to all the people, many of whom stood still to look at me rather than get out of my way, it took even more effort to struggle across the store this time, and in fact I actually did knock a few toys off the shelves.

The helium cylinder was, as Mrs Pyle had said, easy to find in the basement. What was considerably harder was the process of struggling into the lift with the canister, which was about twice the size of its predecessor, and wheeling it across the still crowded shop floor back to the window again. By the time I got back to where Mrs Pyle was standing, I was completely out of breath and couldn't string two words together. I surely couldn't go on this way. Mrs Pyle on the other hand seemed extremely pleased.

"Amanda, you're doing tremendously! Just you keep going in this way and you can't go far wrong. Is there anything you'd like me to do for you?"

I decided to make a tiny complaint.

"Well, actually Mrs Pyle, I was just wondering if you could let a little of the air out of my costume."

Mrs Pyle looked very doubtful.

"Now, now, Amanda, don't you know how much business you're bringing into the shop by being dressed in that. No, I'm sorry, I actually think we need to inflate it more."

Oh no, please no! I then noticed that she had the foot pump again. She proceeded to screw its hose into my valve and pump frantically and enthusiastically, blowing my suit up even bigger. By the time she'd replaced the valve it seemed a miracle I could move at all. I swivelled myself back to the window ready to resume my task, but she stopped me.

"Hold on Amanda, I'm not quite finished yet." She took a thick marker pen out of her jacket pocket, and started to write something in huge letters right down my front, reading each line out as she wrote it down:

"A-M-A-N-D-A"

Next line:

"T-H-E"

"B-A-L-L-O-O-N"

And finally, well below my field of vision on the part of the catsuit that was almost facing the floor.

"G-I-R-L"

"There you go Amanda, that should help attract more attention. Now if you could just inflate another twenty or thirty more balloons and stick them to the ceiling, that'd be great. There's plenty of helium in that new cylinder and it's completely full. Bye now!"

This was proving to be a very testing day. By now, I could hardly move at all with the costume in its now ridiculously inflated state. I could hear people outside reading my new title out and tittering to each other.

"Amanda the balloon girl"

"Amanda the balloon girl"

I wanted to get this over with, so I turned the control knob all the way round on the new cylinder with such force that it jammed. There were a few balloons left on the step of the ladder closest to my hand, so I took one and stuck it onto the nozzle. It inflated bigger than any of the other balloons had in far less time. In a brief moment of clarity, I noticed that the nozzle was as sharp as a needle. With even more effort, I managed to tie a knot in the neck and started to struggle up the ladder.

The crowd started chanting in unison:

"Amanda the balloon girl!"

"Amanda the balloon girl!!!"

"AMANDA THE BALLOON GIRL!!!!"

I couldn't concentrate on what I was doing, which was difficult enough in the first place. With their deafening voices in my ears and my vastly inflated suit, each step was a huge effort. The huge balloon, combined with my now even huger costume, was blocking my field of view almost completely. I suppose it was no surprise that I completely forgot about the slippery pile of balloons half way up the ladder. I put my foot on that rung, slipped and fell onto my front.

At first, I couldn't work out what was going on. My suit, amazingly, was inflating even bigger. Then I realised that it was impaled on the sharp nozzle of the helium cylinder, which was jammed full on. It couldn't be far off bursting either, being virtually inflated to its limits already. Then I realised that it was actually impaled right where my waist would have been! It was going to burst any second now, and when it burst, I was going to fall right on the nozzle and the cylinder was going to start releasing air into my actual body!

I could no longer see anything because the suit was now inflating around my body. I tried frantically scrabbling with my arms and legs, but they just slipped against the air balloons all over the floor that I'd inflated earlier. The last thing I remember before my costume popped was the upside-down word "AMANDA" written on the rubber.

POP!!

The deafening noise made my ears as the rubber layer disintegrated into tiny bits and there was a sharp stabbing pain as I fell onto the nozzle. I was surprised that it wasn't more painful. For a brief moment I was free of the suit's constriction, wearing the inner layer of the scarlet spandex catsuit. I heard a collective gasp from the crowd as the sharp nozzle pierced my skin and the cylinder toppled over. I was now lying on my back. The nozzle had pricked my skin at a steep angle and didn't pierce. any of my internal organs, but nevertheless it was stuck. Ironically, it happened to stick into me exactly where the valve in my costume had been.

Immediately, there was a cold rush and a loud hissing as the helium gas forced itself under the skin of my belly. I struggled to free myself, but it was wedged between me and the wall at the side of the window display and the air balloons I'd inflated earlier made it too hard to get a purchase on the floor. I was going to be inflated for real this time!

The gas forced itself under my skin, firmly separating it from the layer underneath with a sort of ripping sensation, like cobwebs being pulled apart. There was a loud hiss as the cold gas surged into me. It spread across my belly in all directions and I started to look more and more pregnant as it blew me up like a balloon. The swelling forced my legs apart once again and the pressure was building constantly. Terrified, I wondered how big I'd get before I popped, and what it would feel like.

The swelling was creeping up to my chest now and making it swell. I was no longer the possessor of petite breasts - they were blowing up like balloons too. My bra snapped inside the catsuit somewhere, followed soon afterwards by my panties. My skin was getting very tight now and it was all happening terribly fast - it had only been a couple of seconds and I was already hugely inflated. I cried out "Help! Help!" but the crowd just laughed. "What a great actress!" one of them said.

It was one thing to wear an inflated costume, but quite another actually to be inflated for real. The pressure inside me was crushingly strong and it was getting hard to breathe, and I was still inflating. I could hardly believe it, but here I was actually blowing up like a balloon. My torso had become totally round, and the gas showed no sign of stopping. I couldn't move at all, my arms and legs were stuck out again and the gas was actually forcing itself under my skin, which was getting tighter and tighter with every second that passed.

What was going to happen? How much gas was I going to be able to contain before I popped? I was now scared to breathe too deeply in case I burst myself. All I could see in front of me now was the huge ballooning globe that my body had become. I wondered about my funeral. Would they have to put me in a really big coffin, and would people know whether to laugh or cry? If I didn't burst first, would they have to pop me to fit me into a normal-sized casket? I'd turned into a huge round balloon and there was no give left in my body, and I was really inflated almost to bursting point now.

"AMANDA! What the hell's happened! You can't inflate the suit that big, it'll burst. Let that air out right now." It was Mrs Pyle.

I tried to reply, giving short breaths for fear of exploding if I took a larger one.

"Not - suit - it's me!"

"Don't be ridiculous! People can't blow up like balloons! Go on, deflate your costume immediately girl!"

"Can't - fell - on - nozzle."

I was still swelling while this conversation was going on. My body started making ominous creaking noises and my skin was getting firmer and firmer.

"PLEASE! Don't - want - to - pop! Turn - off - cylinder!"

I was a huge inflated globe on the brink of popping now. All I could do was flap my hands and feet uselessly at the end of my vastly inflated limbs.

"Oh my God! You HAVE been blown up like a balloon! You really have! I must turn the gas off immediately!"

She rushed over and struggled with the nozzle, but it was stuck.

"I'll pull it out, Amanda, don't you worry."

"Right - now - please!"

The creaking had been building up to a crescendo and was now joined by a cracking noise. Then, just as I thought all hope was lost, the hiss of the gas faded and died away. The tank was empty. I would have heaved a sigh of relief if I hadn't been so worried about exploding.

There I was, lying helplessly, a human balloon on the brink of bursting. My skin felt incredibly tight and thin, and I also felt very cold. All that helium inside me was at room temperature of course, and my metabolism was now having to struggle to heat hundreds of litres of gas up to body temperature. To the extent that I could, I trembled slightly from fear and the cold, but my flesh was now so tense from the gas pressure that this only produced tiny ripples on my incredibly bloated surface. My jaw was shaking.

"S-s-s-s-o c-c-c-c-old-d-d-d!"

Mrs Pyle looked very worried.

"I'll go and get something to warm you up. Don't worry, you'll be OK. I'll 'phone for an ambulance."

By now, all of the shop staff were gathered around me, talking about the incident. Apparently, despite my now vast size I was invisible, or at least they no longer thought of me as a human being, judging by their comments.

"We've got to get the air out of her quick. Prick her with the scissors."

"No, she'll pop."

"She'll probably pop anyway, maybe we should put her out of her misery."

"What do you think it feels like to be that blown up?"

"I think we're on TV, this has got to be a hoax. No-one could really be inflated like a balloon."

"If she's full of helium, why isn't she floating?"

"Don't be silly, you'd need a whole blimp full for that to work."

It was very scary to have to lie there helpless while they considered, and eventually rejected, the idea of popping me with the scissors.

Back came Mrs Pyle with a baggy sweatsuit big enough for her massive frame. It was red again of course. Everything was red today. It was also the kind that I would have been totally lost in before.

"I jogged into work today because I'm trying to lose weight, so I wore this. It's lovely and warm."

She struggled with my legs, finally forcing my swollen right calf into one leg of the sweatpants and pulling it up to my knees. It took even longer to get my even thicker thigh into it. Then she began the even more difficult job of stuffing my left leg into the pants, which was at a considerable and irreducible angle to my right one. As she did this, she remembered the nozzle.

"Oh no, Amanda, I'm so sorry, I forgot to pull the canister out of you. This'll let the gas out, won't it? Here goes..."

With a yank, she managed to pull the spike out of my left side. There was a very brief puff of gas, which stopped almost immediately. I couldn't see the wound of course, as it was on the other side of the sphere that was now my body from my head. I couldn't get why I wasn't deflating though. Surely, if the nozzle had been pulled out the helium would start to rush out too? Apparently not. Was I going to be stuck like this for the rest of my life? How long would that be anyway? What was all the gas inside me doing to my body? How long could I survive as a human balloon?

For the moment, all those questions remained unanswered as Mrs Pyle finally got my leg to bend enough to insert it into the left leg of the pants and pulled them up firmly. Once she'd actually reached the tops of my legs, she had to tug the waistband up to where my waist had once been.

"I'm sorry about this, but I'm going to have to roll you over."

She gave a shove and I rolled towards the window. It was so different than merely wearing an inflated suit, since through the tightly stretched spandex of my catsuit, pressing against my skin, I could feel every bump of the weave in the carpet underneath me. My weight squeezed down my left side and made my front bulge even further forwards, while my left leg and arm were forced out to point past my head and in the opposite direction. Up until then, I'd only been able to see the ceiling and the top half of my vastly distended body, but as I was rolled over I began to see a vague reflection of a huge round red shape in the glass, and beyond, the huge crowd of people watching me through the window. Not only that, but they had now been joined by a couple of camera crews and picture-snapping photographers, whose flashes dazzled my eyes.

Once on my side, Mrs Pyle hoisted up the back of my waistband over my equally inflated buttocks. My legs and lower belly started to feel a little warmer. Then she started to ease my vertical right arm into the sleeve of the zip-fronted hooded top.

"We're getting there Amanda, don't you worry about a thing. The ambulance is on its way."

As she manoeuvred my arm into the sleeve, I gazed in a strangely detached manner out of the window at the crowds of bystanders and journalists. My embarrassment had now reached such a peak that it couldn't grow any further, just as I myself was now so inflated that I couldn't get any bigger.

The back of the top was now draped across my own back.

"I have to roll you onto your front now, I'm afraid" murmured Mrs Pyle as she gently nudged my balloon body further. I lost sight of the window again as I was rotated onto my belly. I was terrified that this would be the end, that my weight would actually pop me if I was rolled onto my front, but although it squished my sides, breasts and groin out along with my limbs, it didn't quite stretch my skin to bursting point. I felt her stretch the back of the top across my own back and pull it hard to push my hand into the arm hole. Luckily, it was stretchy as well as thick, and it reached. Then she rolled me onto my right side and set to work heaving the two halves of the bottom of the zipper together, which she really had to force. Finally, she was able to zip it up slowly, and again I noticed how acutely sensitive my skin had become. I felt each tooth hook on to its companion in exquisite detail, and a little thrill of vibration went through me with each tooth. Once she had got past my middle, the zipping up could go at normal speed. I worried briefly about what would happen if my flesh got caught in the zipper, but it didn't happen. That would definitely have been the end.

I looked down at my now tightly sweatsuit-clad body. It was amazing to think that that huge baggy garment too big for someone even grossly obese was now almost splitting at the seams around my formerly slight form. The zipper was wrinkled down my front, and again I got slightly scared when I wondered if the zipper pull would prick me. My whole body was somehow both gross and incredibly fragile. I noticed for the first time that I could actually feel the vibrations noises in the shop were causing inside me, and there was a steady throbbing from my heart that caused a regular pulsation in my ballooning flesh.

The ambulance arrived, along with the fire brigade. The latter carefully removed the window as I was now too vast to fit through any of the doors of the shop. As they did this, I realised that although I could see some of myself, I didn't actually know exactly what my new shape was. Paramedics then slid a hammock-like structure under me and winched me carefully out of the shop into the back of the ambulance. The hosts of reporters pointed their microphones at me asking questions like "Amanda, how does it feel to be a human balloon?" and "Are you planning to take legal action against the shop?". Mrs Pyle stayed with me in the back of the van and held my hand, saying "Don't worry dear, we'll soon get all that gas out of you. Everything's going to be all right."

We got to the hospital and I was seen almost immediately by a team of medical staff, who were clearly fascinated by my condition. Several of them said there had "only been two cases before in the literature". They photographed me, measured me, weighed me and scanned me. The only things they didn't do were tell me why I wasn't deflating, how they were going to get the helium out of me and whether I'd be OK. Eventually, I was taken up to a ward, where I was gently strapped to a bed barely wide enough to prevent me falling off, and a doctor came to see me.

"Any questions then Amanda?"

"Yes, actually. Why isn't the gas coming out?"

"Ah well, what's happened is that the wound where the helium entered your body formed a one-way valve and the pressure within it is holding it shut. Actually, it's already started to heal up. We thought about pricking you with a pin, but we can't: you would literally pop like a balloon and it would kill you. What's happened, you see Amanda, is that you've been very lucky."

"Lucky?!"

"Yes, honestly. You see, if the nozzle had pierced a blood vessel, even a very small one, it would have caused gas to bubble into your blood and killed you almost immediately. If it had pierced an organ, it would have ruptured that organ and you would have died of internal bleeding. What happened to you though, is that the gas filled the gap between your skin and your insides. We haven't even got a word to describe your condition, so let's just call you lucky."

"OK doctor, well how are you going to get the gas out?"

"With the previous case we just had to wait and it went down completely in a few days, but she was nowhere near as full as you are. If it had gone on for a fraction of a second longer you really wouldn't be here. Not even your body would have been here, because you would have exploded into a thousand pieces. As I say, you've been amazingly lucky."

Just as the doctor had said, I did start to deflate quite soon, but altogether it took around two weeks. While this process was going on, various things happened. I watched videos and saw newspaper reports on my predicament. When I first saw what I'd looked like I couldn't believe it was really all me. I was just this huge balloon in a brilliant red sweatsuit with limbs sticking out in all directions and a tiny looking blond head at the top. That wasn't the end either. Since my skin had been stretched so much, it was now constantly baggy and floppy, which made me feel deeply self-conscious. I sold my story to a women's magazine and a TV documentary was made about me. The shop paid me a huge amount of compensation and I was set up for life, but I still had the problem of my now very baggy and stretched skin. Then one day, a surgeon came to see me.

"I have a proposition for you, Amanda, which might go some way towards sorting out your, how should I put it, cosmetic problem."

It turned out the surgeon was paid by an advertising agency. His solution was ingenious: he would fit me with a valve which would enable air or another gas to be pumped under my skin as had happened during the accident, but this time in a controlled manner. In this way, I would be able to choose exactly my body shape - the breasts I wanted, the buttocks I wanted and so on. I started a new career very much in demand to advertise various products, such as anti-flatulence medicines, weight loss programmes and so forth. In everyday life, I chose to make myself big and busty, with an ample bottom, but I had as much control over my body's appearance as I did over what make up or clothes I wore. By the time my movie career started, I was well on the way to making my first million. Furthermore, I had started a trend. Women all over the world were having themselves surgically altered to become inflatable, and as fashions go, they were begging to be blown up to ever bigger sizes. Anorexia and other eating disorders were consigned to history. Best of all for me, I had completely lost all my shyness and would never be embarrassed again.

All tags:

• helium
• first person

Login or register to tag items