Via Kate Harding, whose post I first saw on Shakesville, but who also discusses this on her individual blog, Shapely Prose.
I read about this a couple days ago, but I found it so gut-wrenchingly horrifying that it’s taken me a few days to be able to think about it without feeling that place of pain in my mind that I have to slide away from, in order to protect myself.
*
In Gloucester, England, a man called the paramedics when his two hundred and forty-five pound wife began having trouble breathing. When the paramedics showed up, instead of moving her, they began making jokes about her weight.
“They [joked about] getting her out through the window, which I thought was rather disgusting,” the woman’s husband is reported as saying.
According to the BBC, the woman “had had a history of illness, including asthma and diabetes, and the steroid drugs she needed had caused her weight to balloon” to what we Americans would call two hundred and forty-five pounds. The paramedics spent two hours debating how to move her. From the BBC article:
They had tried putting her on an air mattress, but she had slipped off.
“If they’d picked her up, put her in a wheelchair, got her into an ambulance and got her to hospital, they might have stood a good chance of saving her. As it is, she passed away in the dining room.”
In her post, Kate Harding wonders “How does it take two hours to figure out how to move 245 lbs.? I guess it’s tough to stay on task when you’re busy telling knee-slappers about the fat chick. The dying fat chick.”
She concludes, “I don’t even know what to say.”
*
This incident reminds me of two things:
1) How fortunate I am to have been, despite my weight, insulated from the worst things people will do to others because they’re fat.
2) How much more it hurts to read about oppression when it is something that could directly affect your life, especially this kind of random, vicious action on the part of those who are supposed to help you. It’s so hard — for me, at least — to even think about the things that can’t be predicted or acted against, when there is no shield of anger on behalf of someone else. I am made more vulnerable by my own shame. My colonized mind whispers: perhaps you would deserve it.
*
I am locking comments to feminists, but what I really want to do is be locking comments to people who can respond to this post without trying to excuse the paramedics or blame the woman for her own death. I don’t want to hear justifications or diet advice or fat-shaming or “but you see, what really happened must have been…” conjecture.
I honestly was fighting tears when I read this. I’d like to say “I can’t believe it.” I can only say I am so sorry that things like this happen, that people are so thoughtless. All we can do is spread the word. I know I will post about this on my blog. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
This post is very timely for me–timely enough to bring me out of lurkerdom. I am convinced my father would not have died last month had the first ER he went to not looked at his symptoms and seen a big fat guy who ate too much.
My mother is about to have back surgery that wouldn’t have been necessary had her MD taken her contention that she needed a hip replacement seriously the first time she mentioned it, not 6-7 months later. “You’re just overweight. Exercise.” She could and did exercise just fine when both her legs were weight-bearing. Now she has to use a cane or walker and take Dilaudid to sleep.
I wish I knew what could be done to get the medical profession to take bigger people seriously.
That’s disgusting. They should be charged with criminal negligence or something.
This is insane. I hope they drop the hammer on the paramedics. Assuming that they really were to dense to figure it out themselves. (I don’t find that credible) How long does it take to figure out “shit we need help let’s call another two people before this woman dies. Also, since when is 245 lbs more than two paramedics can lift? Isn’t there some minimum requirement for strength for that job. Insane.
THis is disgusting. 245 pounds is not overly big. I would say that some professional athletes (think football players) would weigh in excess of 245. To me this is clearly due to the fact that she is a fat woman. Unbelievable.
Just 245 pounds? Over and above the appalling “let’s mock the fat woman” behavior, when I saw that headline, I thought we were talking about one of those morbidly obese people you sometimes see exploited on talk shows.
245 lb. is above-average, sure, maybe dictionary definition obese, but it’s not outlandishly overweight, and any group of sufficiently fit responders should have been able to figure something out. People much heavier than 245 lb fit though most any door with or without assistance.
Shameful. No excuse for that behavior.
(Fat + Female) still = (open to disrespect and ridicule). We’ve come so far.
Yeah. The trigger in this article for me was that it wasn’t just (disrespect + ridicule). It was (disrespect + ridicule + death).
Oh, I don’t think we’ll be getting blame for the woman. We’ll be getting comments about how it’s bad that they left this fat woman to die, because it wasn’t her fault she was fat–the steroids, you know–whereas if she’d been fat because she ate a lot, that would have been Different.
Pingback: Is it really getting worse (and other items from the blogosphere)? « Shihtzustaff’s Blog
“whereas if she’d been fat because she ate a lot, that would have been Different.”
Yeah, when I found out that my lifelong weight problems are due to a metabolic problem, I was like, “Maybe I should get business cards to document that I should get out of discrimination free.” :-P
Mandolin – I am so with you!! I too have had a life long weight problem. I was forced on to diets as a child and I would gain weight. I remember seeing a gynecologist who looked at me and said you have PCOS and you probably don’t eat that much. I cried. It was such a relief.
I must admit that my first thought was something like, “245 pounds? That’s not even that heavy. What incompetents.” My second thought was also “what incompetents”: even if they couldn’t, for whatever reason, get her out of the house and into an ambulance in a timely manner, there were numerous simple diagnostic and therapeutic procedures they could have undertaken that might have saved her. Basically, it sounds like these paramedics needed to be fired a long time ago. Too bad it took a patient dying to make that happen.
Concerning weight and eating habits, it is my impression that people who are overweight may or may not be so because they eat too much*, but that people who are obese are nearly always so for medical or socioeconomic reasons. Saying “just eat less” is useless at best.
*Then again, why should that be “too much”? Statistically, being “overweight” doesn’t increase mortality so why not eat as much as you want?
Check your math. In this case it’s (disrespect + ridicule = death.)
Yeah. In case we’ve forgotten that fat is a feminist issue. A 245 pound man is… what a lot of men weigh without being considered fat.
This kind of story makes me nauseous and gives me pause regarding humanity. After reading such things, it can take days or weeks for me to feel like people are mostly good again, which is my natural state. I can’t help wondering though, if my regard for people doesn’t ratchet down a notch each time, and it scares me to think that someday I won’t recover from the “people mostly suck” mindset I’m left with.
This is just such bullshit. I recently spent two weeks in a paramedic program here in Canada (before I decided that it wasn’t for me and switched programs). It was made clear to us several times during the application and enrollment processes, and during the training, that by the time we graduated we would have to demonstrate the ability to lift a 210lb patient on a stretcher. It was also made clear to us that we were going to encounter a lot of patients who weigh a lot more than 210lbs. So what do you do if the person is too heavy for you and your partner to lift? You fucking call for backup and do whatever in situ treatment you can do until your lift assist arrives.
I’m blown away by the behaviour of these paramedics
Ditto. i remember my EMT training, which covered (dispassionately, I’m pleased to say) the reality that some patients would weigh more than we could lift, or be too large to transport on a single stretcher, and that we should quickly call backup.
But 245 pounds? makes even less sense. It’s simply not that heavy! Why the fuck not lift her up? Any competent EMT faced with that could get her on a stretcher if they had to. And if not, well that’s what radios are for,
Christ.
I came upon this post after having been reminded of Tyra Hunter elsewhere, so, yeah. How often does this kind of thing happen?
There’s just plain no excuse, no justification, no reason for this to happen. Paramedics who do this should be charged to the fullest extent of the law. This is malicious neglect.
It doesn’t matter if she weighed 245 pounds or 345 pounds. It just doesn’t matter. If you’re in the business of saving lives, leave your primary school childishness at home. Leave your goddamned misogyny, ableism, sizeism, or whatever somewhere out of the line of sight and do your job.
I’m speechless. Honestly, 245 is only about 25-30 lbs heavier than I am now, and while I’m fat, I’m not so fat that no one could possibly move me.
I’m just floored. How horrible :(
I simply can’t understand the paramedics’ point of view here at all. I have carried things and people (with help) that have been 245 pounds and though difficult, not impossible.
I googled image searched “245 pounds” and found lots of pictures of football players. Are these paramedics seriously saying they couldn’t rescue a football player? Jared, the Subway guy, was over 400 pounds at his heaviest. I’ve seen the pants and I think rescue workers could have saved him.
It’s unbelievable. Those paramedics ought to be in jail.
I don’t quite believe the allegation. It has too much of a WMD feel about it. Are we supposed to automatically take this man’s words as gospel? I just can’t make that leap.
This is structural violence. It’s like a textbook example of structural violence. I don’t see much of a moral difference between the paramedics stalling in this manner and them killing her outright. They should be brought up for manslaughter at the least.
Those paramedics were idiots, to put it nicely. (If I said what I really thought I’d be banned from commenting!) I don’t know what it is about paramedics and such, but I’ve read stories quite similar to this before. Maybe it’s some combination of “fat-phobia” and misogyny? (Operating here under the experience that most paramedics are male, BTW.)
I had an experience earlier in the year where I wound up as a not particularly mobile hospital patient, and as someone not much thinner than 245 I was fortunate not to have the kind of experience this woman did. (They had quite a few guys on their transport staff who could obviously handle people of all sizes, and none of them had the kind of bad attitude emanating from the paramedics in this post!) Did these guys not know there is equipment specifically designed to help with the lifting and transport of larger individuals, or what? (And there are also ways to accomplish it without special equipment, if you have some experience.) Geez…sad commentary on both sexism and sizeism.
I know of at least one case where this has happened before (Washington DC, Tyra Hunter). It’s not implausible to me that it could happen again, or that they’d pick on a woman’s weight rather than help her.
Are we just supposed to disbelieve any allegations about paramedics, firefighters, or police officers behaving poorly? This stuff – this kind of violence – happens.
Well, I don’t automatically believe the allegations, either. As freaking awful as this is, actually I find it laughable that two people called paramedics couldn’t move 250 pounds. I can move more than half that myself and I am a weak bastard. That’s all that makes me wonder about the veracity of the story, it just feels very improbable.
Did you hear the story, about the fat woman who was left in a hospital for hours, writhing in pain while nobody helped her? They just were like, twiddling their thumbs, when there is a person writhing in pain in front of them, screaming. Oh but you know, who cares, she’s fat she was gonna die anyways.*
I agree with what Kate said. About how hard it is to figure out how to put a fat woman in a wheelchair, while you’re knee-slapping about how she’s fat. I would expect this lack of concern for another person, in a horror film. Cause it IS horrific. That there are people out there, who would just sit and watch as someone dies. Isn’t that like, a sign of having the mind of a serial killer or something?
* Refers to when I’m being sarcastic.
My father (post #2) was heavier, more on the order of 300 pounds. Three years before he died, he almost died (bleeding ulcer) on a bathroom floor because he had a broken ankle that kept him from helping the paramedics get him onto a gurney, which ended up being a six-person job.
I am not making this up. The reason I did not give the details of his death by idiocy in post #2 is that my mother may yet go to court over this. Whether the original story was correct in its details or not, similar things happen all the time. Really: three times in my immediate family within the last ten years. If there is an advocacy group, I’d love to know about it. I don’t care why a person is big–they deserve to be taken seriously by the medical profession.
It was like how I was arguing with someone yesterday about size acceptance, and he said he had five doctors in his family and they discuss it all the time. So I said, “So tell me then, does the Hippocratic Oath mean anything at all?” All he said, was “Thats. Not. The. Point.” In other words, he didn’t want to admit the doctors in his family were all sizeist and prejudced.
Of course, it goes without saying that he’s obessed with the idea of being 100 pounds overweight. I’m sure most people would feel neurotic having to be around 5 doctors who belive the obesity hysteria.