The world’s heaviest woman has arrived in Mumbai, India, to undergo a weight-loss surgery that could help save her life. Eman Ahmed weighs approximately 500 kg and was admitted Saturday at Mumbai’s Saifee Hospital.
Ahmed was born in 1980 in Alexandria, Egypt. During her childhood, she suffered from a thyroid problem which forced her to stop attending school. Currently, Eman does not only faces obesity but also suffers from many other diseases such as severe lymphedema and water retention, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hypothyroidism, gout, severe obstructive and restrictive lung disease. She has also already suffered a stroke that left her right arm and leg paralyzed, she does not speak coherently and is at high risk of pulmonary embolism, as reported by The Times of India.
Eman Ahmed will undergo a weight-reduction bariatric surgery that will be carried by Dr. Muffazal Lakdwala. Bariatric surgeries are special procedures that help the body lose weight by restricting the amount of food the stomach can receive, as explained by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. This restriction occurs by reducing the size of the stomach using any bariatric method, being the gastric bypass, sleeve gastrectomy, and the adjustable gastric band the most commonly used.
The particulars of the procedure the woman is undergoing are confidential, but any of them can bring her what she needs to change and save her life.
A hard trip with big goals
Eman’s medical visa to travel to Mumbai was initially denied, so her family contacted Dr. Lakdawala in October last year to help them and take the case. The doctor approached External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who granted her the visa for her treatment.
This was Ahmed’s first trip outside her home in Alexandria after nearly 25 years of spending her life in her room and unable to take care of herself. It was such a complicated trip that doctors had to begin treating her since December to ensure that she could travel safely from Egypt to India.
“To prepare her for the flight, the team of doctors have been in Egypt for the last ten days to optimise the conditions for her travel; given the fact that she is so heavy and not moved for the last 25 years she is at a high risk for a pulmonary embolism and hence has been put on blood thinners to try and minimise the chances of such an eventuality during her transfer,” Dr Lakdawala said in a press release on Friday, as The Times of India reported.
A special transportation had to carry Eman due to her heavy weight. She was airlifted on a personal aircraft since she could not pass through the doors of a regular-sized plane. After arriving in India, she had to be “loaded onto a truck using a crane,” and “another crane was then used to hoist her to her room in Saifee Hospital,” as reported by The Inquisitr.
After she was admitted to the hospital, Eman Ahmed has to undergo “thorough evaluation” for the next two days, according to a spokesperson for the doctor, before going into surgery.
Source: The Inquisitr