Weighty Motivation

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – A man who once weighed
more than half a ton has lost 321 pounds under the care of a team of
doctors and hopes to lose 450 pounds more.

The former restaurant manager has been bedridden since last fall. He has battled
heart failure, thyroid problems, diabetes, pulmonary hypertension and arthritis,
and needed help just to roll over in bed.

"Until recently, I wasn’t able to
see any light at the end of the tunnel,” he said Monday from his hospital
bed. A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for
Deuel to be driven
to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed. According to the Guinness
World Records Web site, the record for heaviest man in the world is 1,397 pounds,
held by Jon Brower Minnoch of Bainbridge, Wash., who died in 1983.

Deuel, who
has battled weight problems all his life and blames his condition in part
on genetics, said it took months to find a hospital. Hospitals closer
to his home
balked at admitting him, he said.

"I got scared because I couldn’t help
him anymore, and I didn’t know who would help him,” said his wife,
Edith. Harris
said Deuel’s care could cost millions of dollars, much of which the hospital
may have to cover. Officials found a special ambulance, and hospital workers
joined two beds to accommodate Deuel. One of Deuel’s goals is to walk out
of the hospital.

He also wants to go to a Nebraska Cornhuskers football
game,
and just take a walk with his wife. "Even though he’s faced negativity
all these
years, he’s not a negative person,” Edith Deuel said. "He’s almost always
been able to stay bubbly and make jokes and be happy.”

from AP