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Source: Reuters
Several days ago, Daniel Webb, a 33-year-old associate pastor, died. His death isn't unremarkable, the manner in which he died is.
Webb, who reportedly weighted 408 kg, went into cardiac arrest as emergency workers were trying to cut him from the Lay-z-Boy reclining chair where he had spent the last nine months. Webb, who was covered in sores and human waste, had remained there having been deposited in the chair by emergency workers, according to his grieving wife Ada, after he had hurt his knee.
According to Ada, he only weighed around 226 kg then. As per an Associated Press report , his wife remembers that the paramedics pointed out that if they put him in the chair, he wouldn't be able to get up. Webb said for them to put him there anyway.
Though he probably didn't know it, at that moment, Daniel Webb had decided to die.
Lacking medical insurance, unlikely to receive any because of his size, having nowhere supposedly to turn, and ashamed of his condition, Daniel Webb remained in the Lay-z-Boy, talking with people on the internet about religion, and presumably eating, until his condition worsened such that his mother called paramedics. He was so enormous by this stage, that they reportedly had to cut their way into his home in Greenwood County, South Carolina.
I'm not so sure of this. A local TV story on the events shows a small slit incised in the door of his trailer home.
Webb perished on the day of his second wedding anniversary. His wife insists that he didn't die from cardiac arrest, but a broken heart.
The very facts of this story seem... crumbly, to say the least. Why didn't his wife phone for an ambulance much earlier? And when he started to soil himself in his chair, as he did, didn't she think to have one of those serious talks that the married or affianced or co-domiciled must periodically endure?
Surely the most pressing question is, "Why did she keep feeding him?"
Taken on face value though, the story could be pointed in any direction.
I could tease it out to make an argument about the cruelty of the current healthcare system where those with so-called pre-existing conditions are denied insurance coverage, or in the case of death, payouts. I have heard of at least one instance where the insurance company suggested that a man who drowned in his hot tub, in the company of no one more homicidal than his two pooches, may have been murdered. Anything to avoid coughing up the dollars.
But there aren't enough hard facts to do so. Ada Webb is reported in one article as saying her husband was turned away from hospitals for his knee injury, and in another that he had been repaired. Hospitals from what I understand don't deny care in emergency rooms, though they do make it very unpleasant and galling to sit waiting for the delivery thereof.
Perhaps then a little sermonette against the fatalism of the Southern American poor? However, Greenwood County, where Webb lived and died doesn't, from what I can determine, seem particularly blighted. About 10% of families are below the poverty line.
What is notable to me is the part shame played in this. It's easy to believe America is a land of exhibitionists. You'd be forgiven for thinking this if you ever go anywhere with a cameraman in tow. Americans know how to smile on telly. They know how to deliver the soundbites that we in the business call "good grabs".
That Daniel Webb felt so ashamed of his weight, and yet was unable to do anything about it except continue to dig his own grave with his jaws (and with the complicity of an apparently-loving wife) says that there are many things Americans can't and won't talk about. These can be fatal.
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