Seventy stone is a lot. In new money, it’s 445kg, or the equivalent of 1,780 packs of lard. If you put ‘what weighs 445kg’ into a search engine, you get the following answers: a fourteen hand racehorse in tip top condition, a marble slab that nearly killed a construction worker in Canada, a fully grown musk ox and a fat bloke in Ipswich.
At that weight the ox can run at a speed of 37 miles an hour, but Mr Ipswich hasn’t even got out of bed for the past eight years.
The last time he left the house, to go to his local hospital, they removed a window, and got him out with a fork lift truck. Now he needs to be transferred to Chichester for a gastric band. He’ll be winched out the window frame, and placed in a specially adapted ambulance, at a cost of £90,000.
You may be wondering: What’s wrong with a removal truck? And why is there no bariatric surgery centre closer to home? But the real question is, not how did he get so fat, but how did he stay so fat?
I had a patient recently with a BMI of 52, small potatoes compared to this chap, but she was also bedbound. After retrieving my ultrasound probe, and indeed entire arm, from the depths of the folds of fat, I thought: “Hang on. Who’s bringing her food?”
It turns out the Suffolk sperm whale - who’s on benefits and been getting fat at our expense - had a secret accomplice. His dear old mum. For the last 2,922 days, she brought him 21,000 calories of nosh a day. That’s over 61 million calories. Which is 266,791 Mars bars, including 3,201kg of fat.
I can’t even imagine what you would have to eat in the space of a day to get to that calorific total, but it’s more than seven times normal. And yet this frail, little old lady (I picture her miniscule, bird-like) continued stuffing god knows what into her growing little lamb.
Not any more. She popped her clogs six weeks ago, and since then it has taken two carers to look after him, and draw attention to his plight.
When Winnie the Pooh got so fat on honey that he got stuck in the doorway to Rabbit’s house, his friends were sensible enough to starve him until he lost enough weight to escape. They didn’t give him even more honey. Now if small, stuffed, and indeed imaginary, farm animals have that much common sense, why don’t we.
It has got to be cheaper to set up a care unit in his own home, and take advantage of his helplessness to support him through some initial weight loss. I’d be surprised if there are even laparoscopic tools long enough to get through the layers of blubber to put the band in.
It might be useful to install a fatcam, so his predicament is available on the web, as a lesson to us all. We could then send messages of support on You Tube as we watch him shrink before our very eyes.
I’m sure one of the satellite channels could make a compelling 24/7 reality show, Really, Really, Really Big Brother, with a natty Geordie voice over. “Day 1,493 and Mr Ipswich can finally wipe his own bum.”
