733 Pound Man Desperate For Life Saving Surgery

At just 23, Jeff Zeidman should be in the physical prime of his life.   Instead, he’s in a prison, but he hasn’t committed a crime.  Zeidman is morbidly obese, and his prison is his own body, which has ballooned to an unmanageable 733 pounds.

As a result, he spends almost all of his time holed up in his apartment by himself, unable to muster up the energy or courage to face the world outside. 

“Being trapped in a prison isn’t a very happy place,” he admits.  “It’s depressing and you know, you just don’t care.”

“I spend…24 hours a day in my apartment and don’t get out very often just because of joint pain and you know difficulties with my mobility.”

Jeff has tried diet after diet always gaining the weight back, and then some.

His doctor says his only option is gastric bypass surgery. But here in Ontario that operation is virtually out of reach.

“In this province right now there’s relatively very few surgeons who would do this procedure and as a result the waiting list associated with this operation is very, very long. Some say up to five years,” admits Dr. Patrick Yao, a bariatric surgeon.

But Jeff’s mother, Laurie, is afraid her son doesn’t have five years.

“I fear he is going die,” she admits.  “I got scared when Jeff called me and told me he was stuck in bed. And I feared that day would come when he would be bedridden.”

Laurie has also battled obesity, losing 150 pounds over the last couple of years.

“I know what it’s like, I was 330 pounds,” she reveals.  “Nobody talked to me, people stared at you, and so I can just imagine in Jeff’s shoes what it’s like.”

The Ontario government currently sends about 2,000 patients down to the States to get gastric bypass surgery at a cost of $60 million, but Jeff, and his mother, feel time is running out.

“There’s no way to get out of the hole I have dug for myself, I’ve basically dug myself a grave and you know, I’m getting ready to get to the point where they can fill it in.”