Rescuers battle to help 32 stone housebound Thai man who gorged on rice all day
Rescuers battle to help 32 stone housebound Thai man who gorged on rice all day
Paramedics are battling to help 32 stone Thai man whose weight ballooned after he spent every day goring on rice.
Eak Thachin, 45, used to be a construction worker but after a lumbar disk disease operation, he was forced to leave work in Uthai Thani province since 2013.
After ten years of being house-bound, the man gained massive weight from being an 80kg worker to 200kg until he could no longer stand up by himself.
He would spend all day eating rice without doing any exercise.
Local officials who heard about the man sent a team to pick him up so they could take him to the hospital with the help of paramedics on May 3.
Eak said his condition worsened during the pandemic but her wife had to leave to find work so she could provide for the family.
He said: ‘I received 800 baht a month as welfare for a person with a disability.
All of that has to be saved to survive each day so we couldn’t use it for travelling to the hospital.
‘My wife took over the responsibility of finding a job, running chores in the house, cooking food and cleaning up after me but she faced a challenging time during the pandemic.’ His wife Sudjai Thachin said she was hired to work on a farm but she was worried that something might happen to her husband if she left for long hours in the day.
She said: ‘I was hired to grow cassava near our house but I’m concerned that something might happen and my husband would be unable to help himself.
‘I make 250 baht a day which I use to take care of him and my little son.
At night I also help him change positions or he would have body sores.
It’s so painful for us.’ Some of their neighbours also helped rebuild some parts of their house that were worn out after hearing about the couple’s struggles.
Eak is now receiving treatment at the hospital as medics run tests on him while his son and wife were left at home.
The Royal College of Physicians of Thailand conducted a study in 2014 showed that more than 20.8 million Thai people had suffered from obesity in the last seven years.
At least 37.5 per cent of the group were reportedly at risk for non-communicable diseases including diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, asthma, and cancers.
