Strange story. I vaguely remember the guy being in the news.Paul Mason used to weigh close to 1,000 pounds. Now that he’s shed almost all of it, freeing himself from his tomb of a body, he’s facing a question that’s heavy in its own right: How should he spend the rest of his life?
In the stagnant country of his little bedroom, on the island of his gigantic bed, with two curtains sewn together to clothe his body, Paul Mason decided that he didn't want to die. Three years had seeped in and out of the room, with his head at the same angles, the mass of him pooling outward, the banal sensation of the air-conditioning breathing onto his urine sores. By then Mason had been dubbed the world's fattest man, perhaps the most ridiculed person in the United Kingdom, trapped on a 10-foot mattress, everything he'd ever collected on shelves within arm's reach. He was also weary of his appetites; he no longer wanted to consume his daily intake of nearly 20,000 calories. He was exhausted of wondering what it might be like outside his house.
He wanted out of his skin, and skin was all that he'd become. He had given up on losing weight naturally. His breakfast was the meal of ten people—a pack of bacon and a pack of sausages and countless eggs, and his snacks were 40 bags of potato chips and 20 chocolate bars a day. An intercom system on his front door allowed restaurants to deliver food to his bedside, entering his little flat through the doors and hallways specially widened by England's National Health Service. He wore a little white towel draped over his privates. At his heaviest he'd weighed 20 pounds shy of 1,000.
He knew that bariatric surgery had a good chance of killing him, just as it could save him. The procedure, he understood, would shrink his stomach from the size of a melon to the size of an egg, bypass much of his small intestine, and give him a 50 percent chance at a new life. The other 50 percent meant a possible heart attack or blood clot, a burst vessel, catastrophic organ failure—a complication that would snuff him out before he even awoke from the operation. But without the surgery he was dead anyway.
Read more:
http://www.gq.com/story/how-the-worlds-heaviest-man-lost-it-all
