Side Show Mary

Mary, a lady in her late thirties, was admitted to our unit for help with weight loss. She’d been the circus fat lady for one of the major big top circuses for a number of years, but once she’d gotten so heavy she wasn’t able to walk, she became bed bound in her home. A family member finally called the fire department and when they arrived, they sawed around her door to make it wide enough to get Mary out, and then brought her to our hospital. When she arrived, we weren’t able to get an accurate weight but knew that she was well over 750 pounds. Our transportation gurney weighed 250 pounds and when we loaded Mary on and took her to the freight scales, the needle buried on the other side of 1000 pounds.


In those days, there weren’t any king size hospital beds available for patients so the engineering department of the hospital bolted two hospital beds together for Mary. When we needed to provide Mary with care, we would have to climb up onto the bed with her; otherwise we couldn’t reach far enough across her body to properly bathe her. Bedpan time was a major event. It took several nurses to get the pan positioned correctly underneath her and then to get it back out again and clean and dry her.

Mary, who loved to eat, was placed on a 300 calorie diet. The weight immediately started melting off. Saturday was weight day and it took most of the staff to get her loaded onto the gurney and pushed to the freight scales. The hospital was very old and our unit was on the second floor. The elevator was also old and a bit temperamental. We were all afraid to get on the elevator with her, so we devised a system of pushing Mary in so her head was facing the door and she could push the elevator buttons herself. Then we would run down the stairs to the first floor and greet her when the elevator doors opened. We used the excuse that the elevator was too small to hold all of us, and we never let on that we feared it would break under the strain of her weight.

I remember the day the needle on the scale finally dipped below the 1000 pound mark, meaning that Mary weighed 750 pounds. We all cheered and clapped, and Mary even offered up a little smile for us. From then on we were able to monitor and chart her progress. The doctors had set a goal of getting her down to 300 pounds so they could perform a new surgical procedure on her. That goal was met nine months after Mary’s admission to our hospital, and an intestinal bypass surgery was performed. A large portion of the middle of her intestines was bypassed so that a good amount of the food she ate was not absorbed. Complications were terrible and she had chronic diarrhea and electrolyte imbalances. Sadly, six weeks after having undergone the surgery and now weighing 250 pounds, Mary died from liver failure. We now know that intestinal bypass surgery had a 50% mortality rate. I still feel a deep sadness when I think about Mary spending so many months eating almost nothing, finally being able to once again get out of bed and walk a short distance and losing two thirds of her body weight, only to die of complications from an experimental surgery. And that was more than forty years ago.