{"id":3737,"date":"2007-10-19T23:43:32","date_gmt":"2007-10-20T07:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/10\/19\/paramedics-allow-woman-to-die-because-of-her-weight\/"},"modified":"2007-10-19T23:43:32","modified_gmt":"2007-10-20T07:03:20","slug":"paramedics-allow-woman-to-die-because-of-her-weight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3737","title":{"rendered":"Paramedics Allow Woman to Die Because of Her Weight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Kate Harding, whose post I first saw on Shakesville<\/a>, but who also discusses this on her individual blog, Shapely Prose<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“They [joked about] getting her out through the window, which I thought was rather disgusting,” the woman’s husband is reported as saying.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

They had tried putting her on an air mattress, but she had slipped off.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In her post, Kate Harding wonders “How does it take two hours to figure out how to move 245 lbs.? I guess it\u2019s tough to stay on task when you\u2019re busy telling knee-slappers about the fat chick. The dying fat chick.”<\/p>\n

She concludes, “I don\u2019t even know what to say.”<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This incident reminds me of two things:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}