Two weeks ago I finally managed to get the Tetherspout in.
As a recap, the Tetherspout consists of two pieces; a 6mm hollow tube with an 8mm flange on one end, and a “retainer” - basically a washer - that the spout fits through. The retainers come in various sizes on the French scale used by urologists. 3 Fr = 1mm; so 27Fr is 9mm.
The male urethra starts at the bladder, loops down, then out through the penile shaft until it gets to the glans. Between the glans and the shaft there’s basically a wall between different types of tissue doing different things. The urethra stops at the wall, turning into the “fossa navicularis”, generally shown as an olive-sized open space inside the glans. That’s what makes the glans spongy; it’s partially hollow. The far end of the fossa has the meatus, or pee slit.
Just behind the meatus there’s a tough fibrous ring. I don’t know the proper medical name for it; urology seems to ignore it. While the urethra is stretchy, the ring limits the size of things that can pass through the meatus; for example, large kidney stones can pass through the urethra and get stopped by the ring. The ring can be stretched, but only slowly. It took me several months to open mine up from 5mm to 10mm, the average being 9.5mm. That was one of the “strictures” I talked about in my rehab thread.
I have a set of hollow penis plugs from 6mm to 10mm in French steps; ie 8, 8.33, 8.66, etc. They fit handily in a .308 cartridge box. Nowadays I can start with the 7 or 7.33 plug and it takes five or six days to work up to the 10mm.
This last time I got up to the 10mm, then switched to a 10mm with a hinged glans ring, which kept it from falling out. I wore that for another week, putting a good stretch on the ring before letting it slide out.
Putting the Tetherspout in involves threading dental floss through two holes at the mouth of the spout, then pushing the spout down into the urethra a bit to get it out of the way. Then you pass the floss through the hole in the retainer, turn it sideways, and slide it in. Retainers come in various sizes; I used the 27Fr one, which is 9mm. The diameter is actually a lot larger than that, but when you turn it sideways it will pass through a much smaller slit, the same way a button works on your shirt.
You’re supposed to pull on the floss and manipulate the glans to line the spout up and pass it through the retainer. This had always been where I got stuck before; the damned spout wouldn’t line up, and I’d eventually get sore and give up. This time I had a good stretch from the days with the 10mm plug so I had more room to work. I still had trouble turning the retainer into the proper orientation; it felt very large and very tight. But once I got it into position the spout came right through.
Ta-daaa!
As I said earlier, most medical illustrations show the fossa navicularis as being a large open area shaped like an olive. But I found an illustration from an 1870s medical text that showed a fossa barely larger than the urethra, and heavily pleated longitudinally. Apparently my fossa is like that, so it took some extra effort to get the retainer turned.
I’m using a mid-length threaded retainer. I screwed a stainless steel nut on the outside end to keep it from slipping out of the retainer and down my urethra, like happened when I did the “fully internal pee plug” experiment with a 7mm plug. When I was laying on my back one night it decided to slip down all the way to my prostate. Urine pushed it back into the glans when I took the next leak, and presumably the same thing would happen with the spout, but I didn’t want the retainer to get twisted out of position if it lost the spout.
Anyway, there was a modest amount of discomfort at first. The retainer felt very large and sharp-edged, even though it’s nicely rounded. Occasionally I’d get shooting pains. There are apparently a lot of nerves in the fossa navicularis, and they didn’t care for the retainer, even though they weren’t bothered by the plugs. It took a few days before that went away. After that, sometimes my underwear would bend the external part of the spout to the side, which would move the retainer, which would require an ‘adjustment’ of the wedding tackle, but that has mostly gone away.
After a week I slowly resumed pumping and edging. No problem at all. Jelquing has been fine too, other than the burst blood vessel (not near the retainer) I got from being a little too enthusiastic. I haven’t tried clamping yet.
The best part is that I don’t have to carry the bag with the pee tube and wipes any more. Unzip, flip it out, pee, shake, tuck it back in, just like before I got that infection that damaged my meatus and made me piss like a lawn sprinkler.
The manufacturer says the bits should be removed periodically and cleaned, but he doesn’t have a specific recommendation as to when. Presumably scrunge of some sort builds up on the steel. Apparently a lot of his sales are to the male chastity crowd, who use the spouts to lock their cock cages on; just as secure as a Prince Albert piercing, but no pissy mess. Those guys wear them for months at a time, without any problems as far as the search engines have turned up.
At two weeks, I not only don’t notice it, I have to reach down and touch it to make sure it’s still there. It’s about time to remove the nut and try the plastic cap again. It was a little too sensitive to install the cap at first, but now that I’m used to the spout it shouldn’t be a problem. The cap prevents drippage going out and (hopefully) any UTI-causing bacteria from getting in.
