“Fattest Man in the World”
Massive man-mountains like 70 stones Paul Mason who brought the dismal title “World’s Heaviest Man” home to Britain recently, actually give obesity a bad name. He isn’t typical of the millions of adults and children in this country whose lives are blighted by fat. His predicament, which has now become a severe disability, is sad, but his alleged personal quest to become the fattest man in the world is freakish and contemptible. Sadly for him, his mother, Janet, died a couple of months ago – and it was apparently she who nursed him when her son became too large to walk or get his own meals. He couldn’t attend her funeral because he couldn’t leave the bedroom which is now his world. He now relies on a team of seven carers, working three eight-hour shifts, including a physiotherapist who visits regularly, and the house doorways have been widened. The total cost of his care, accommodation, benefits, medical equipment and treatment is estimated at more than £100,000 a year and has so far topped £1 million. But it may all be money down the drain – wasted on a man who some say enjoys his notoriety and was actually disappointed when he lost 20 stones after a stay in hospital. So before they cart him off to hospital now to get gastric bypass surgery, they should first send in a psychiatrist to find out if he really wants to lose weight, and with it his veritable army of supporters – the health workers who wash his bedsores, wipe his bottom, ensure his TV and playstation are within arm’s reach of his bed, and feed him up to 20,000 calories a day. I am saddened at my own hard line. I neither know him nor his deeper issues, and I cannot understand why anyone should desire such a non-life – because he’s either a spoilt child demanding ever more sweeties or a man with grossly distorted values perhaps dictated by the small screen that has become his only life. Either way, he makes me cross. I am constantly campaigning for compassion for obese people whose lives are blighted by their own weight. These are the everyday people, just like me, who have found they cant’t control their size and who try to battle on with earning a living, maintaining a family and keeping a stiff upper lip whilst crying inside. These are the children – and I pass one particular boy for whom my heart bleeds every day on my journey to work – who are teased, taunted and abused as they wobble to the bus stop, to face yet another school day where their only solace from a feeling of worthlessness is a plate of chips at lunch and a family size bag of Doritos on the lonely walk home. They deserve a future – and want and need a healthy one. But their distress will never be understood in all its complexity while the media focuses with such relish upon the freakish concerns of men like Paul, and while he panders to their lowest-common-denominator voyeurism. Men, and women of seventy stones are uncommon (though even our Super Large Obese Patients are getting bigger every day). They are not what the obesity epidemic is about. They are the extreme, the stuff of car-crash TV programmes and National Enquirer front pages. Let’s not judge others by their example. I even had a woman ring in to my radio show (BBC Radio Berkshire – 10am, you can listen online!) who said that “fat people inflict the problem upon themselves by drinking melted down Mars Bars and feeding their kids with liquidised Chinese takeaways!” No they don’t, I remonstrated. When did you last meet someone who did that? You’re confusing Homer Simpson with reality, I retorted. But she had the image stuck firm in her mind that all fat people were gluttons with “rolls of fat, weeping bedsores and other people wiping their backsides because they were unable to do it themselves!” “They’re all the same – disgusting!” she muttered as I cut her off and moved on to the weather news. But that’s what people like Paul do to the rest of us. Tar us all with his brush. Let’s not forget the vast majority of obese people are desperately trying to solve their problems so they can get their lives back and contribute to society. Our job is to get past Paul and his like, erase his destructive and negative image from our brains and then help those who really deserve it and want to get better... |
