Michigan’s Heaviest Person: The Sad & Tragic Life of Carol Yager
Michigan-born Carol Yager has gone down in history as the heaviest woman ever recorded. Her top weight was 1,189 pounds.
Carol was born in Flint, Michigan in January 1960, living most of her adult life in the town of Beecher, six miles north of Flint. She had been interviewed numerous times and even appeared on The Jerry Springer Show. When asked what she thought her reasons were for her obesity, she pointed to mental disturbances caused from sexual abuse by a family member when she was a child. Even though she said she ate food in normal amounts, her weight kept rising throughout childhood.
Taunts & name-calling from neighborhood and school kids didn't help; more than likely she ate more as a way to find comfort.
Carol made seemingly endless calls to weight specialists, hospitals, medical centers, etc. for some kind of help...but when they found out she weighed over 1,000 pounds, they balked and refused their services. She told the Detroit News, “I felt nothing mattered.....I didn’t care about anything”.
In January 1993, after not being able to walk for nine months, Carol was finally admitted to Hurley Medical Center. She had to be helped out of her house by no less than fifteen firefighters. They rolled her up in a tarp, slid her down a hill, and placed her on the floor of the ambulance for the ride to the hospital. After three months of being on a restricted calorie diet, she was down 521 pounds, which would have made her weight 668 pounds.
Unfortunately, records state that when Carol passed away in 1994, her weight had gone back up to 1,200 pounds...almost twice as much as when she was released from the hospital. She was 34 years old and her height was five feet, seven inches. Her official cause of death was listed as “kidney failure, with obesity and multiple organ failure”.
After Carol died, her boyfriend Larry married her friend, Felicia.
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