Half-ton man loses 573 pounds in one year

updated 6:42 p.m. ET June 25, 2005

VALENTINE, Neb - He still is a mound of a man, but his blue eyes widen with delight as he presses his chest with his fingertips, smiles mischievously and makes the grand announcement: He can FEEL his ribs.

To Patrick Deuel, this small moment is huge. Headline huge.

Man Can Feel Ribs — A First in 25 Years.

One year ago, Deuel weighed 1,072 pounds. He was so enormous that his bedroom wall had to be cut out to extract him from his home. Then, he was rushed to a South Dakota hospital in an ambulance with extra-wide doors and a ramp-and-winch system that had to be dispatched from Denver.

One man. More than a half-ton. Mind-boggling.

Grim reality
So, too, were the grim realities of Deuel’s life. He hadn’t left his bedroom in seven months. He’d barely been outside in seven years. He couldn’t sit up. He couldn’t roll over by himself. He had heart trouble and diabetes and needed oxygen.

Patrick Deuel was dying. A photo taken last June shows a pneumatic-like figure sprawled helplessly on his stomach looking like an inflated balloon.

Now 12 months after being hospitalized for gastric bypass surgery, Deuel sits on a love seat that is propped up on cement blocks. He still looks like a plus-sized Buddha. But he is less than half the man he used to be and that, his doctor says, is amazing progress.

The patient concurs.

“I’m used to looking in the mirror and seeing the Michelin man,” he says. “All of a sudden ... I look a little more like a human being and I say, ’Ooooh, my God, where did HE come from?”’

Deuel does a quick inventory of his shrinking, yet still massive body: He touches his ribs. He stretches his fingers like fans to see bones and tendons.

Below 500
But thrill No. 1 is the magic number on the scale: 499 pounds.

He pumps a fleshy arm in triumph. He hasn’t been south of 500 in two decades.

Deuel now goes out almost every day, walks a bit, exercises and thinks about all the things he hopes to do someday.

“Life,” he says, “is infinitely better.”

Patrick Deuel’s weight was off the charts before he even knew it.

Before he could walk or talk, he says, medical records defined him as obese.

By the time the ambulance pulled into his driveway in this tiny town more than 40 years later, Deuel had long been a prisoner of his many pounds. He couldn’t work, attend a college football game (a Nebraska banner hangs on his living room wall), or — for a time — even sit in his parent’s home.

And he wasn’t shy about talking about it.

When Deuel arrived at Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls, S.D., he welcomed the spotlight, determined to prove he was no Guinness Book footnote but a man with a message: Obese people suffer because the health care system and insurance companies don’t do enough to help them.

He also didn’t mind being an inspiration.

“If I can lose weight, anybody can do this — and I mean ANYBODY,” he says. “My willpower is basically zero.”

In the year since, Deuel’s story has brought him more than 2,000 e-mails and letters from as far as China and Saudi Arabia. He has acquired an agent (he has been paid to appear in a British documentary and on German TV magazine shows). And he has talked openly — and often humorously — about his obesity.

“My dad says I was supposed to be 8-foot-4,” he likes to joke, “but I quit growing.”

Deuel, 43, says it has been frustrating not to be able to lose weight and humiliating to be called names — ’Fat Pat’ was a common childhood taunt — but he’s not one to analyze a life defined by obesity.

“I always thought it was a problem that some people had and other people didn’t like,” he says simply.

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