'World's fattest man' says he was slated for slaughterhouse cremation
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He wasn’t too keen on being roasted like a pig postmortem.
The former world’s fattest man, who once tipped the scales at nearly 1,000 pounds, claims that his UK hospital ward had planned to cremate him in a slaughterhouse if he died due to his massive size, the Daily Mail reported. He detailed the inhumane idea in the ITV documentary “The World’s Fattest Man: 10 Years On.”
“I thought it was disgusting. I couldn’t believe they were doing that,” Paul Mason, 61, revealed of the medical institution where he had stayed for three years.
The Ipswich, England, native, who was the subject of the TLC show “The World’s Fattest Man,” explained, “If I died in hospital, they wouldn’t be able to deal with someone my size, so they made a form up to say that if I died in hospital, they’d have to take me to an abattoir to where the large animals go to and die . . . And I’d be cremated in the animal cremation.”
The news was especially disheartening as Mason overdosed six months ago, after being depressed about packing on the pounds during the pandemic, the US Sun reported. The behemoth Brit had to be rescued by paramedics who hoisted him out of his home in a sling because the elevator wasn’t working.
Prior to that, Paul had been consoling himself with potato chips after several scheduled surgeries — two knee replacements, a new hip and several hernia operations totaling more than $130,000 — had been waylaid by the lockdown.
“I use [crisps] to keep the edge off because I’m in terrible pain through the arthritis, and I have a doctor who will not give me any proper pain relief,” said the ample individual, who currently resides in taxpayer-funded housing in Plymouth. “She said I’ve just got to live with it.”
It’s been a long road for Mason, who, at his low point, was eating 40 chocolate bars a day, which had caused his teeth to decay. As the colossal couch potato struggled to leave the house, he was forced to remove his cracked chip chompers with pliers — a method he’d reportedly employed on a dozen teeth. Prior to the self-surgery, he would anesthetize the area by driving a hot needle into his gum to kill the nerve.
During a medical emergency in 2002, responders had to demolish part of the house so they could extract Mason via forklift and transport him to the hospital in a five-ton ambulance specially built for the morbidly obese.
The situation had become so dire by 2010 that the mammoth man was required to undergo gastric bypass surgery, which shrank his stomach to the size of an egg.
From there, things started to look up. Mason was contacted in 2013 by Rebecca Mountain, a US woman who had seen him on TV, and subsequently moved to Massachusetts to be with his new paramour.
Mason’s weight loss was working wonders for their sex life. “The physical side of our relationship is fabulous,” gushed Rebecca in 2013. “We have a physical chemistry as strong as our emotional chemistry.”
Her newly skinny soulmate added, “It’s so intense. It’s just a touch and that really triggers feelings I’ve never had before.”
The lovebirds got engaged a while later and in May 2015, Mason underwent a series of operations in New York that dropped him down to just 266 pounds.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, Mason suffered a mental breakdown and reverted to old habits, the Sun reported.
“At my lightest, just after my surgeries, I was 19 stone [266 pounds] but my mind was not right, I weren’t that 19-stone person,” said Mason, who turned to chips to cope with his identity crisis.
Eventually, the Englishman’s snack relapse got so bad that the couple decided to call off the engagement in September 2015. Following the split, he ballooned up to 420 pounds.
Mason even resorted to robbing supermarkets, which resulted in him getting a $50 fine during a 2018 court appearance in the US.
Determined to stop the yo-yo effect, the snack-jacker returned to the UK in 2019 to “get his life back on track” and take advantage of the country’s free health-care system.
Now, several years on, Mason hopes that he can finally conquer his demons and achieve some peace of mind.
“Ten years ago, I didn’t know where I was, but now I do know what I want,” he said.
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