Sigh

AMR, a Portland company, has come out with a new supersized ambulance to meet the needs of obese patients in need of emergency care.

They had to build a whole new ambulance.

A whole new ambulance with a gurney rated for a 1000 pound victim. One thousand pounds!

And a winch.

With an ordinary ambulance, he said, it took "a lot of brute force" by six to eight emergency medical technicians to load extremely obese patients.

"We'd load this person on there and they'd be very uncomfortable," he said. "They'd hang over both sides." Sometimes a patient would have to sit or lie on the ambulance floor.

All respect to the morbidly obese aside, but this sickens me. Not that I don’t think that all people, of any weight, deserve to have emergency medical care, and need not suffer the indignities of literally hanging over the sides of conventional gurneys or having to just lie on the ambulance floor. It’s simply that the thought that American obesity has gotten to a level that justifies the commissioning of a fleet of Super Ambulances, makes me literally sick. Especially when considering the endemic famine in places like Africa.

OK, I’ll step to the side of the bullshit for just a second: yes, I laughed, too. Now back to the diatribe.
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I just don’t understand getting yourself in the kind of position where it literally takes a small forklift to move you around. That was not a joke. The article mentioned that hospitals sometimes had to use forklifts to transport their 650+ pound patients. Can you imagine the plumbing bill?

Kaiser is putting fans in rooms of patients who are extremely heavy and is using special sheets to wick perspiration from their bodies. Special beds with inflatable cells are available at Kaiser for the extremely obese.

To assess your own risk of riding in the Ambulance…SuperSized with a Coke, calculate your body mass index, and then hit the gym… or lose weight through unemployment. You know, one or the other.