Inevitable Realism

An article is making its way around the fatsphere generating no little bathos. A six hundred pound est., man entered a hospital leaving a trail of mawkish self pity and passive aggression in his wake.

“My stomach hurts,” he says, his voice surprisingly high and childlike.

It gets better;

It’s hard to tell, exactly, but I think his pain is coming from somewhere around his stomach.

Pure gold.

Now, whenever I hear about stories like this, I'm always rooting for the person concerned to assume a haughty froideur.

The hospital was not fully equipped for this guy. They couldn't x ray him and he was not surprisingly uncomfortable keeping an awkward position for too long.

We start an IV and get some blood work, all of which is normal.

Lmao. Oh man seriously, how pissed do you think they were about that?

I talk to the patient between procedures, trying to get a sense of him as a person. He recites a litany of consultants he’s seen for his back pain, his headaches, a chronic rash on his ankles, his shortness of breath, his weakness, his insomnia and his fatigue. All of them have failed me,” he says, adding that the paramedics didn’t have the proper ultra-wide, ultra-sturdy gurney to accommodate his body. The Americans with Disabilities Act says that they should have the proper equipment to handle me, the same as they do for anyone else,” he says indignantly. “I’m entitled to that. I’ll probably have to sue to get the care I really need.”

Atta boy! [I wonder if he used to be slim?] Don't take any nonsense. This is a start. I just can't stand any more tragic capitulation. At least he's trying.

This is the endgame of not listening when people tell you, doesn't work. We told them!

To rely on doesn't work in the face of what you can see, with your own yes, well, there's no happy ending for you.

It's just possible that the increasing reality of them having to deal with theirs and society's folly, will convince them to relent. To tell the field of "obesity" to get its bloody finger out and start being reality based, believe it when I see it though. 

He lies at the very large center of his own world — a world in which all the surgery mankind has to offer cannot heal the real pain he suffers.

Yeah a world in which you have to run around after him-between trying to dump him elsewhere. I could live with the doctoring/research/quackscience classes throwing up their hands, but why wouldn't they let us progress? Why did they keep shaming us into repeat, repeat, repeat until we could stand it no more? Why did they have to waste our stentorian efforts? We could have faced the truth and shared some of the load. We were so willing, we participated in the experiment with slavish devotion. Why couldn't more value have been extracted out of that? This could have been a unique experiment of partnership between lay and professional. What you could have had now!

Instead, you have a lot of exhausted people trained replace their thoughts with bullshit, which is the last thing any of us needs. 

The patient lies trapped in his own body, like a prisoner in an enormous, fleshy castle.

Oooh, get you being all picaresque. But we know you're talking about yourself and your own feelings. You are trapped by your professions' own hubris. And whatever is really at the bottom of this reluctance to get real answers.

And though he must feel wounded by the ER personnel’s remarks, he seems to find succor in knowing that there’s no comment so cutting that it can’t be soothed by the balm of 8,000 calories per day.

Oohooh bitchy, did you see that? Well, perhaps you'll seek succour in your hospital supplies of ethanol. I understand some of you do that.

Just goes to show bullying people doesn't bully biology. Margaret Thatcher used intone thunderously. "You can't buck the market." You cannot buck biology, not with denial, delusion, quack science, nor iatrogenics.

Later on in my shift, still feeling traces of the patient’s presence, I sit and stare at my 700-calorie dinner, all appetite gone, wondering where empathy ends and compassion begins.

No worries there as you haven't got any. However this reality check might start people realizing agreeing a false reality doesn't change the real one. Sorry about that.

I know why my colleagues and I are so glad to have this patient out of the ER and stowed away upstairs: he’s an oversize mirror, reminding us of our own excesses. It’s easier to look away and joke at his expense than it is to peer into his eyes and see our own appetites staring back.

Golly gosh gee whizz.

This unfeasible tv proposition achieves its popularity through the sight of punishing consumption. In the guise of fat people starving and purging away their sinful "unhealthful" countenance. Though, never unhealthful enough not to drop dead under conditions that would fell many of those baying for their sweat. This serves to purge collective guilt about rampant consumption and avarice. The voiding of fat bodies becomes an exorcism of everyone's suppressed sin and above all, fear that payment/punishment will be exacted at some future point.