ER fat with knee pain TLDR: Fat with knee problems. Fat mother. Fat people are a cancer. The last submission got a great response, so I’m going to try another. Frontline medical story this time. I was a medic in the Army. MEDEVACed a lot of guys who got ate the fuck up. Worked with a lot of the guys who made it back. It was war. Got out and into civilian medicine, which somehow for me is worse. A lot of civilian conditions are self-inflicted and avoidable, but that’s a rant for another day.  So a kid came into the ER the other day. 14 and spherical, like a Death Star with legs. Huge surprise, but this kid has knee pain. No known injury; it just started. Usually when someone has knee pain it involves the ligaments or some form of osteoarthiritis. Occasionally there might be a fracture. This kid had an injury that I’d never seen before. Instead of articulating posteriorly to the patella, his femur went lateral while his tibfib went medial. Basically, his thigh was sliding to outside while his shin was sliding to the inside. I’d seen dislocations before, but his bones were cocked out at angles that were different from typical traumatic dislocations. To me, it simply looked like his knee gave in under the weight and collapsed underneath him. I’d dealt with a lot of stuff before. Battlefield injuries, power tool accidents, things that are generally not pretty. But this one really broke my heart. Because I remember what it was like to be 14. Trying to kiss girls and touch boobs. Riding 4-wheelers and camping out in the canyon. Pick-up basketball games and rock climbing. And this kid can’t even walk because he’s too fat. But the thing that really pissed me off was his mother. Of course she’s obese, but not nearly as much as him, and that really rubbed me the wrong way more than anything else. That she obviously has limits for herself as to how fat she can get, but there is no limit for her child. She will let her own child exceed in his gluttony to a point that is even unacceptable to her, to the point where his growing body can no longer support him. At some point, she put down her own fork but continued to gorge her child. So what do I do? I work in corporate health care, and to the shareholders customer service is more important than a fatty’s life. If he was smoking then under current insurance rules the nurse would be required to consult with them on tobacco cessation, but he wasn’t smoking. He was eating. I give them their temporary fix. I suggest consulting with a pediatrician about a weight loss plan to help with his recovery, but she obviously does not like hearing that and her eyes glass over. I treat the symptom and move them on because ER beds are valuable. Write my report so we get paid. Make plans to take my kid out for a field day so that this doesn’t happen to him. Let it eat at me, and then bitch about it on here because it really does bother me. The world will always be in discord. People will always hate and fight and hurt each other. Somehow as a society we’ve gone from preparing our children for this world to actively contributing to their destruction. Fat people themselves are like a cancer in that they must spread their disease to those closest to them. They don’t breed; they replicate.