Much harder, and often impossible — especially in emergency situations.
Emergency Rooms and Operating Rooms often simply do not have the personnel to lift and turn over very obese patients. When the clock is ticking, critical time can and will be lost which often leads to severe complications, or death.
But even in many common procedures complications can occur due to severe overweight, and that’s what many obese people do not seem to understand — or at least the “fat-is-beautiful” people.
Only recently a good friend of ours who is morbidly obese need a kidney stone to be removed, and my girlfriend would do the non-invasive procedure through a lithotripsy:
Lithotripsy treats kidney stones by sending focused ultrasonic energy or shock waves directly to the stone. The shock waves break a large stone into smaller stones that will pass through the urinary system.
It turned out that the fat layer was just too wide for the shock waves to travel through, and the surgery did not work out in the end.
In another instance, an invasive surgery on a morbidly patient had to be stopped because the nurses could not lift a huge bag of fat which was in the way. These things happen all the time when patients are too big and heavy.
The simple truth — which should be said — is that standard surgery becomes complicated and even virtually impossible in very obese patients.
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