Fet Milner

The Amazing Sofa-Woman Centaur

I'm not a big man. Hell, I'm downright skinny. My six-foot body carries a modest fifty-seven kilos around with no great difficulty. This is no doubt due in at least some small way to my metabolism, which my doctor once described as "the cheetah of the metabolic world". I also smoke, which, as Simpsons aficionados will recall, Troy McClure advocates as an excellent way to lose weight. Still, I regularly eat the meals of a much larger man.

It is with great wonder, then, that I see images of the morbidly obese. One of the most famous fatties in history, Fatty Arbuckle (the Fatty of the Fatty and Skinny films), once crushed a starlet during a sexual romp, resulting in her death and his arrest (though he was eventually acquitted). More recently, the world wondered at the strange case of Gayle Laverne Grinds -- the woman who, for six years, never left her sofa and became fused to it. Tales of her demise trickled across the world, devouring column-inches in newspapers and magazines as it went. She had, apparently, merely lain down one day upon this sofa (her favourite, one would hope), and never lifted her great bulk again.

Gayle Grinds, at death, sans sofa, weighed in at 480 pounds (217kg in our eminently sensible metric), while only fetching a paltry four-foot ten (1.46 metres) when upright. It is no surprise that her husband was unable to move her from her repose. When paramedics were summoned to her aid (the illness is not specified) workers had to first don protective garments and install ventilating hoses to protect themselves from the ungodly stench of her lethargy. Gayle Grinds, having never moved from the sofa in six years, had not emptied her bowels into a toilet in six years. The walls and floors, I read, were covered in excrement and assorted decaying foodstuffs. Upon discovering that Gayle Grinds was in fact fused to her sofa, it took the workers a further six hours to knock down a wall, construct a platform to transfer the sofa to, and to then move this centaur-like sofa-woman to the back of a truck (as her situation resulted in her being far too large for an ambulance). An hour later, Gayle Grinds was dead, the trip to the hospital -- or, perhaps, her exposure to clean air -- having been more than her abused body could take.

When I first read about this woman, who had not left her sofa in six years, my first thought was, "How did she go to the toilet?" This question was followed by a delightfully graphic image in my head that, it turns out, was remarkably accurate. But, somehow, I failed to ask the more pertinent question: "With all the wonders the human body performs to maintain its health, how can anyone actually get that fat?"

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