Flashback: A Pool of Fat
When I was 18 I had a temporary night job working in the sign shop of the basement of a hospital. All the staff were getting new engraved name badges and I was working the engraving machine, making all of the several hundred badges that were needed.
One night I got a call from upstairs. They needed me to go up and assist with a patient. I was terrified -- not that they wanted my help, but wondering why they wanted my help. With all the doctors and nurses and so forth upstairs, why would they call the temp guy from the basement? What was so horrible about this patient that nobody else could/would do it?
I went upstairs and immediately noticed that every patient door was closed... a red flag that something was up. I inquired at the Nurses Station and was directed to a triple room at the end of the hall.
I stepped inside the room where I spotted three things immediately:
- A dozen hospital staff and a couple of paramedics
- Two beds strapped together in the middle of the room, no other furniture.
- Jabba the Hutt looking at me on the bed.
I then learned that this was not in fact Jabba, but a 740+ pound woman. She was naked and looked like a massive lump of melting silly putty... an oversized half-filled pink water balloon... a pool of fat. Lying on her back, her knees and part of her calves were hidden by the massive stomach and each enourmous tit sagged a foot and a half out to each side. There were folds that went only God knows how deep, and what would otherwise be a delicious aroma of bread eminated from them. A catheter tube came out from under her stomach down by her ankles slowly dripping urine into a foley bag, and I felt sorrow for whomever had to insert that.
She was being transfered to another facility. They needed my help moving her.
The paramedics brought in two gurneys and strapped them together, but her weight was beyond the capacity of them so we could not raise them to an elevated position. That left us with the additional problem of not only having to get her from the bed to the gurney, but also having to lower her to the floor at a speed slower than the speed of gravity.
First we tried lifting her by hand from all sides, but it was like trying to lift a waterbed mattress -- lifting the fat in one place just cased it to slide somewhere else. Next we tried lifting the sheets themselves with her on them, but the sheets began to tear.
We finally realized that the only way we were going to accomplish this task short of a forklift was to slide her to the edge of the bed and then roll her down onto the gurney. But how to ensure we would not drop her? After a short discussion we realized we had only one viable option available.
The three youngest, fittest guys in the room -- of which I naturally just had to be one- - knelt down beside the bed, arching our backs. The remaining staff hoisted the woman uo, then slid her down our backs as we used our arms and shoulders to push up into her to keep her from falling.
I still shudder to this day, nearly two decades later.
Once it was accomplished, a crew of four slowly pushed the gurney through the halls to the freight elevator, which took her to a waiting ambulance backed up to a loading dock.
I think I need to go shower again, I feel unclean.
(PS - The woman above is NOT her, that's just the result of a Google Image Search for "700 pound woman".)
I am a firm believer in providing a good science education at an early age. So when my youngest brother was three I gave him his first anatomy lesson. "Kurt, I have bad news for you," I said. "There's a SKELETON living inside of you!"
