Half-ton man winning diet battle

A man who once weighed half a ton is shedding the pounds on a life-saving diet at a South Dakota hospital.

Patrick Deuel is down to about 50 stone and hopes to lose at least another 28 stone.

When the 42-year-old entered the hospital in Sioux Falls, he weighed more than half a ton – a disaster Deuel blames on bad genes and his early years in the restaurant business.

He kept eating until he hit 76 stone, a weight that could only be determined when he was put on a scale used to weigh lorries loaded with grain. To get him to the scale, a wall had to be knocked out of his home in Valentine, Nebraska.

From the truck scales, Deuel was taken by specially-equipped ambulance to Avera McKennan Hospital about 300 miles away in Sioux Falls on June 4.

“When Patrick came in, he was dying,” said Dr Frederick Harris, who leads a nine-person team caring for him.

Deuel suffered from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and other obesity-related problems, says Harris. He had trouble breathing and was malnourished because so many of his calories came from foods high in fat and carbohydrates.

Now on a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet, Deuel hopes to hit the 21-stone mark and be healthy enough to have stomach-stapling surgery, which can be risky.

Deuel’s weight loss is about eight months ahead of schedule, his doctor says. Recently, Deuel took his first steps in months. He now can walk on his own a short way down the hospital corridor.

He hopes to move into a rehabilitation wing of the hospital, possibly as early as October.

Harris – who used to be obese himself and had gastric bypass surgery a few years ago – mounted a vigorous effort to get his hospital to admit Deuel. Much of the cost of his care will probably have to be absorbed by the hospital, the doctor said.

The staff has set up a custom-made bed reinforced to carry his weight. Workers installed a patient lift system to help nurses and assist with weigh-ins. A hospital room was remodelled to accommodate him, his plus-size bed and the medical staff tending him.

A gregarious man who asks for hugs from nurses and visitors, Deuel says he does not mind the attention he has received since arriving at the hospital back in June.

“So long as people hear what I have to say,” Deuel says, ”as long as I am succeeding in getting my message out, it doesn’t bother me.”

Bedridden since last autumn, he thought about trying to keep his identity private, but decided he could do more good by talking about obesity, its stigma and the lack of financial and medical resources available for people his size.

Deuel, just under 6ft tall, has always fought his weight. He weighed over 6st in kindergarten and more than 17st in middle school. His father and grandfather were both big, too.

But he says years of bad eating habits and a career in the food business pushed him into trouble.

“Some was genetic, sure,” he says. But as a cook and restaurant manager who worked long hours and had access to nearly any food, he ate what he wanted.

He was still in his 20s when he went on disability benefits after a fall 16 years ago and has relied on Medicare – a government health plan for the elderly and disabled – to cover his medical expenses. Over the years, he says he asked Medicare to cover weight-loss programmes he couldn’t afford.

But Medicare did not consider the programmes to be medically necessary, says Deuel.

The implication is “losing weight is not something you do for your health. It’s something that you do to make yourself look better,” he says.

For the severely obese, weight loss has little to do with looks, says Deuel. “There is no way that 1,072lbs is cosmetic. That’s life-threatening.”

This summer Medicare announced it would review its policy on obesity. In November, an advisory panel will study gastric bypass and other weight-loss measures to see if Medicare should pay for them.

More than 100,000 morbidly obese Americans had the stomach surgery in 2003, up from 25,000 in 1998, according to the American Society for Bariatric Surgery.