The Betrayal of Christina Corrigan: Thirteen Years Later

I've had a lot of time to think about this case. The year I went on disability [1997] and other health problems from a massive weight gain, is the year this case broke. Fat girl is is found dead on the floor next to some food containers, covered in waste and her mother is arrested and charged with neglect. In size acceptance news, it is the top story for months. It hits me in the gut, because I weigh about the same that VERY year and knew I was dying, and did not know why. For those who are new to this blog, see this entry.

Christina Corrigan was a young girl of thirteen who weighed 680lbs at the time of her death. Her mother later was arrested and charged with child abuse pending accounts that Christina had been found covered in bed sores and in feces. Marlene her mother was later convicted of misdemeanor child abuse.

Marlene took her daughter to doctor after doctor over 90 times, to deal with her mounting weight. Christina weighed over 200lbs by age 7, she was to gain more then 500lbs the next 6 years. In regards to the trial, one fat activist talked about it on CNN:

HULLINGER: Judy, as you sat and watched this trial, why have you come to the conclusion that obesity is the central issue of this?

FREESPIRIT: Because the mother was not neglectful of this child. The child was definitely fat. She definitely had the bed sores that they claim she had. The problem was that the mother was never able to get any help from the medical establishment.

She took the child to the doctor 90 times between the age of birth and eight. All that she ever got was low calorie diets and told to exercise her. She never got any kind of medical help. After you've gone 90 times to the doctor and gotten no help, why go again?

The problem is that we assume that there was something there for her. There may have been, but she wasn't getting it where she was going, and she was a member of an HMO.

The people that failed Christina was not only her mother but the medical establishment, she had been taken to doctors with no help, and only blame. It is interesting to note that her mother received blame to the criminal end, unlike the sympathy a woman would received for a child disabled by another condition. One thing, the claims about the urine and feces are a joke, everyone who dies, loosens their bowels.

The pure neglect of health problems of the severely obese and the myths that surround them grow worse and worse. No normal 13 year old girl would have been able to eat her way up to this weight. It is interesting to note that this girl up to age 3 was on a medication known for weight gain for the treatment of grand mal seizures that can bring in pituitary involvement. My conjecture today is either this medicine affected Christina's metabolism or Christina had undiagnosed Prader Willi syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects hunger and metabolism and can lead to severe weight gains in children. It is obvious too, that Christina Corrigan lacking mobility and worse, her mother was struggling to care for her.

Cardoza, the lawyer in the case admitted that medical problems not mere overeating probably contributed to Christina's weight. Her former doctor as Cardoza attested on a talk show I watched {Leeza}, said "Lady, there's nothing wrong with your kid, quit feeding her."
Sadly Christina's doctor blamed a genetic predisposition to gain weight, overeating and lack of exercise. He did some basic tests but ended it after that. His prejudices leading to bad science and what happened to this girl: Lowest common denominator medicine with a giant dash of laziness included! Even a sane person would ask..."What could a thirteen year old eat to weight 700lbs, and would a normal thirteen year old even have that type of appetite? The answer to these questions are in the negative, but when it comes to fat people, hatred overrides common sense.

Marlene attested to going to doctor after to doctor until giving up. If she is guilty of anything perhaps that is it, but the doctors are just as guilty then.

What gets me, is if the doctors didn't play the game of moral judgements of refusing to find a cause of obesity based on prejudice and the claims of immoral behavior and gluttony, what is ironic is at least some supersized people if treated with the correct medical insight could avoid the special challenges of being super sized to begin with.

Christina Corrigan for her weight alone was denied access to a normal education. From the facts of the case, one could deduce, that money was tight in the household. Her school which was placed at the top of a hill required students to walk up several flights of stairs, that Christina was incapable of surmounting. [Wonder how many disabled or older folks, can't go up them either?] NO special education or other arrangements were made. She dropped out and had to be home-tutored.

The possibility of Prader-Willi syndrome was immense. I found it odd, how no samples had been saved at her so called autopsy to do a DNA test. In Prader-Willi syndrome there is high tolerance to pain and often times skin-picking which could have accounted for all the bedsores all over Christina. The defense also pursued the avenue of brain damage from her treatment with Phenobarbital.

Only a cursory examination was done at the autopsy of Christina. The coronor looked no further then for outward visual clues denying the opportunity to find out the actual malady that affected Christina. No samples of her tissue were taken.

Christina was treated in life as she had been in death. After failing to find the reason for her extreme weight, her main pediatrician referred her to a nutritionist. Cardoza, the attorney said Dr. Ray should have realized something more needed to be done after she saw Christina's weight ballooning for six years. "My God!", he said outside the courtroom, "If that wasn't a pattern, what is a pattern?"
While her mother perhaps failed her in some ways , many other people were just as culpable, the school in failing to provide an accessible school or classroom, social services for not providing home health care, the nutritionist in not realizing this was a problem that no diet counseling in the world could solve,the doctors in not adequately diagnosing the disorder or providing other case management or help.

Today I ask, has anything changed? Are there going to be new Christina Corrigan's? Will a new young woman watch the weight go up up up, only to be blamed and vilified and not believed? The sad thing I think is probably so.

Update to this article: 2018. I was diagnosed with Lipedema stage IV in 2014, so I was correct that something more was wrong, when I started this blog in searching for what my true medical issues were. I survived the fat bigotry, just barely, Christine did not.

The Troubles of Fat Comedians: John Belushi and Chris Farley

I've often wondered about this question? Everyone knows that class clowns were often fat, maybe to deflect being made fun of? To make joy to cover up the pain? The fat comedian is a stereotype same as the sad clown. It is known that many male comedians are fat, and they can be the funniest folks out there. However there is a dark side to this phenomenon, just about every fat comedian out there has showed massive pain, insecurity and worse, that goes beyond the usual Hollywood fare.

One of the favorite comedians out there was John Belushi, I have read many of his biographies, and it was sad to read how behind the scenes he did start trying to break out against his big guy funny status, seeking serious roles.

Hollywood did not treat well Belushi's attempt to break the mold he had formed. Fresh, from NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Life", Belushi became a break out star in his 3rd season in Animal House as the ever greedy couch prowling slob Bluto. He rose fast to the top circa 1978. It was a role that served as Belushi's entrance into Hollywood but also became a trap, four years passed before a serious dramatic role came his way in Continental Divide [1981] loosely based on the late crusty Chicago Tribune Columnist Mike Royko. That movie only became a mere cult success.


Hollywood had a different agenda in mind for its favorite college rabble-rouster especially when it witnessed the mountains of profit, Bluto's character had spun off. This expressed itself in massive theatre revenues, but took on less subtler forms too. Within a year, three networks rushed to develop sitcoms complete with it's own resident rebel couch potatoes. It's only speculative to see what Belushi may have been capable of and what would have a sober Belushi been able to have done, free of serious drug addictions? Belushi admitted to many negative feelings regarding his weight and what kind of roles he was being given. He felt he had been forever type-cast. Before his death in 1982, he was under major pressure to do a movie called "The Joy of Sex" whose scenes included a typical male from birth to death and called for the wearing of an enormous diaper. Why wouldn't a man be troubled over such indignities?

Twenty years later, the cycle repeated itself in the late 90s with Chris Farley, Farley grew up on the same taunts used to haunt his father. "My Father is a big man", the comic told US magazine during that time, "600 pounds maybe more, I worry about him, I love him dearly with all my heart and I see him when he goes to the mall, and the fingers pointing and the laughing and it's ****** tragic! It's terrible to see the fear in his ****** eyes. God ***** it, man he doesn't want to be like that. For Christ's sake, he doesn't want to be that big. People don't understand, and they laugh and they think it's funny but it's very sad for the person afflicted."

Chris Farley too fulfills the stereotype of the fat comedian who used self-depreciating humor and wild buffoonish behavior to gain audiences attention. In one of his TV appearance in 1997, Farley cavorted through a diner pursued by cops on Fox's Mad TV. The laughter flowed as Farley plowed through tray after tray of take out food. Farley was to die as a result of a drug overdose and drinking too. His biography too reveals the dysfunction, the severe struggles with addiction and embarrassment about his weight as well. Too often this story has played itself out, fat comic using humor as a vehicle to hide the years of pain about being fat in today's society, achieving fame but inside feeling the disrespect. It was revealed Chris Farley even said: "I don't want to be the fat guy who falls down anymore."

Fat and Not Jolly? Oh My!

“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There is a new trend in America where being positive is almost a mandate. You better smile or else! Deep Thinkers need not apply, Analyticals shut up! What is the modern melancholic to do? The pallor faced thin goth can be artistic and write morose poetry and get away with it but the fat person who isn't jolly better watch out!

Employers do follow "Fish" motivation enterprises where you better have fun at work or "else" as they reward you with a plastic fish instead of a raise or a day off. The worse thing to be told is "how negative you are!", even if you are dying of cancer, and your house is to be foreclosed on, keep that stiff upperlip and do not burden people with your troubles! Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Underminding America", I loved this book and highly suggest it, while I don't agree with her politics, at least one person out there stood up against the POD PEOPLE!

With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

I do believe one should be thankful to God, do not take a roof, heat, or food for granted, and try to enjoy life with people who can still feel, rather then the dead-inside brigades. Can someone change their personality to be someone else? And why would they want to?

Fake happiness and forced perkiness is the stuff of repression, nails in fists, and bit tongues, shallow discussions about the weather, and house decoration, and false clouds of fake non-bliss. It is the place of loneliness and dying inside knowing you are voiceless among pod people who are more interested in showing themselves as "perfect" by every societal standard, then in being honest and real. When you are overweight these expectations become even higher. So I am not fat and jolly, I tend to be serious and like to read. Tough! I'm tired of trying to be someone I never will be, nor have no interest in being.

The stoics show no love, no care, as they insist everyone else keeps the fake smiles plastered on their face. Thank God, I have friends I can be real around. I worry that there are people out there, so busy wearing the masks, no one really knows them, and they do not even know themselves.

The Fat Girl's New Clothes or I Don't Want to Dress Like a Construction Worker!

Being tall and fat, my round features and double chin consigned me to Sears Roebucks "Pretty Plus Department', where my mother worked. I couldn't count on the safety net of my jumper uniforms-with their blue, plaid, Peter Pan style collars that had gotten me through seven years of Catholic school. I dreaded shopping for clothes with every ounce of my being: I'd see my mother getting frustrated, dragging me from store to store, hoping for the right pants to fit my extreme-pear shaped figure.

I'd shot up to a 24/26 misses size--where I'd stay until around age 26 before the fun really began and a size 12-13 shoe. Being 5'11, I stood taller then 80% of the boys I'd meet, and a good deal heavier too; but how could I stage-manage my height, when the weight was ever present.

I'd dream of cutting off my toes and shrinking into the "petite' drawer where all the popular girls resided. Truthfully, I hardly felt like a girl, when they were supposed to be cute, thin and smaller then men.

Adding to my misery, the larger women's clothes were usually ill-fitting, too short, and locked into those mysterious half sizes for the "stocky and short". In the mid-80s of axis of Calvin Klein, Guess and Gloria Vanderbilt, my grandma styled shirts with those weird useless tabs on the sleeves, men's shoes and "high water pants" only cemented my low high school status.

The pattern never changed with my mother admonishing me as she fit pants over hips that outpaced my waist by 10 inches. That didn't include my arms--always too long for the '80s blazers--causing my mother to tell me, "you have very long arms!"

Other times I'd hear, "Soon you will be wearing muu-muus", or "What will you do for clothes when you get too fat to buy any?" since I was at the tippy top of the size scale for the 16 Plus shop. Such one-liners became an unpleasant reality when I shot up past my mother's 18-20 size during my junior year. It couldn't be any fun for her either, but not surprisingly, these trips ended with me getting mad or in tears, and my mother fuming about the weight that refused to come down: "Don't you want to be able to wear pretty clothes?"

I'd shoot back, "Why don't they just make them in larger sizes?"

But even the plus sized stores, it seemed, were prejudiced against my upper end of the scale. For years, I noticed the odd size 24 mingled with the endless colors of size 14-20 styles-even though I was seeing plenty of older women my size too.

Everything seemed made for extremely short fat women with big bosoms, not fat tall, extremely flat chested and large hipped women like myself. I dreamed of flowing fabrics, long dresses and tunics, but felt consigned to my mother's taste for Oxford shirts and narrowing jeans--everything unforgiving of a large figure. Even then I wouldn't find any dresses that fell below my knees until the mid-90s.

When I got out of the house and become free to make my own fashion choices, I started buying more dresses and started breaking the constricting fashion rules I was brought up with such as the odd rule that one had to wear uncomfortable nylons every time they wore a dress. Those things were abysmal.

Into the 90s there become more choices for clothes but even then they were hard won. I would travel 20 miles to this one specialized clothing store that catered to large women, dropping 400 bucks [a huge amount of money for me] to buy decent dresses. Most of what the mainstream plus size stores offered was far too masculine, boring, too form fitted and "tailored". Walk into those places, you see a couple dresses on the far wall, and there's nothing but jeans and construction worker clothes!

Most of these places make the mistake of just making the thin women's styles "bigger" which doesn't mean on a fat women they will be flattering. Wide waist bands on pants? Come on! , these pants if anything will make a woman look far fatter. Culottes? Do not get me started. One thing I'd love to tell the plus sized moguls, do not design dresses with top to bottom buttons for fat women! Why are most of these dresses so short?!

Modern fashion has lost a lot of zing, and gotten uglier and uglier, where it seems we have gone to a place of everything look like it's from the 80s but shorter and tighter. OK, so maybe I dress like it's 1890 but at least I can move around and bend over without everything being put on display. What is it with those tops that are cinched in right under the bust, that make everyone overweight look pregnant?

Also someone needs to tell women over size 18, jeans are not flattering! Actually I do not think they are flattering to anyone! If anything has become the new Maoist uniform for American it is blue jeans! I'm bored even seeing them on everyone! Adding high heels to the picture, doesn't help either, it just looks tacky.

Today, I wear all dresses, yes there is some practicality to it, weighting 500lbs and trying to hoist some pants over your rear-end, isn't easy. Pants on a body shaped like mine look ludicrous. I buy my clothes special made from couple stores that specialize in the ultra plus sized woman. The main one already mentioned is sancutarie. but there are deals to be found on ebay too.

Younger Disabled People Ending Up in Nursing Homes

A New Nursing Home Population: The Young It's cheaper to keep someone at home with aides, but now the trend has been to institutionalize people in nursing homes. This articles says a full 14% are ending up in nursing homes. With so many cuts being made to programs that help the disabled [while they still pour trillions into useless Middle Eastern wars], many people are finding making it on their own to harder and harder. It's not just the wheelchair bound but those struggling with severe obesity too. I had a close friend, who ended up in the nursing home, so I know what those places are like, especially if you are poor and destitute, it is not a pretty picture. The wealthy can afford apartments where the nurses and aides come in--assisted living, but the poor end up in an 8x10 room with a roommate included. My friend told me, that much of the population of her nursing home were younger severely obese people who could not take care of themselves out in the world. The nursing home associations themselves are discussing this issue. The disability advocacy organizations are warning about the new trend towards shoving people into nursing homes, some young people given the right supports are able to live independently. Every severely obese person does worry about the nursing home, one broken leg, any condition that precludes walking, the nursing home can be a fate worse then prison. If I was not married, I could easily be in a nursing home right now and two years ago, I was in even poorer health. It is a somewhat frightening thought. Some of the homes are run nicer then others, the small town non-profit ones are usually nicer then ones ran as holding tanks for some corporation to make money.

My Life As a Fat Teen #1

Square peg in round hole syndrome all the way! A constant blur of activity and motion characterized my high school years, starting at home-where I spent hours doing yard work, or helping my mother clean the house.

During my first two years of high school, I had gym every day, and also join the golf team as a sophomore. We weren't allowed to use golf carts, so we had to walk the entire course. The next year, I spent hours on my feet as a salad girl [this was when salad bars were in vogue in the 80s], among other jobs.

For all this exercise, I was was still fat. However back then I wasn't falling into the super sized category yet: I ate normal meals and had lots of movement. Magazines like Seventeen reflected a different reality: to have any prayer of getting a boyfriend, I had to be micro-miniature. All their clothes were sizes 3-5, a world that lay beyond me.

Somehow, these girls always had time for a boyfriend between their part-time jobs, perfect grades, flawless makeup, and shopping for an endless array of clothes to show off their lithe figures, with not an ounce of fat.

At school, a few girls were fatter then I, and a few more approached my weight. But the majority were blessed with thighs that magically never touched in the middle, their stomachs flat as a board, and blemish-free; and their necks were sinewy, and showed veins.

I saw the outline of clavicles in their shoulders, and the pelvic bones in their hips. Their bodies were so unlike my own, we might as well have been females of a different species!

In secret, I liked the curves of my own body, particularly my stomach. As an asthma free teenager, I could run around in 20 degree weather without a coat and barely feel it. Nowadays when the temperature dips that low, the heat is on high and I'm buried in blankets. I was stronger back then too: the ill health of college had not yet hit full force, teachers asked me to move heavy objects just like the boys, with whom I'd wrestle with and win at times.

Thinner girls though had a license to be carefree, happy-go lucky and most important vulnerable: I was none of these things. At home, I could relax a bit while hanging out with my siblings, in school, if I showed any weakness, I would have gotten squashed.

I wasn't anybody's girlfriend: people sought my advice with their problems or homework but never offered party invitations. Taking my weight out of the equation wouldn't have mattered: I went to a provincial upper-class high school-think of the one in The Breakfast Club but with the jocks in charge and the art kids pushed to the back of the bus and an even more fascist tinge. Annoying constant pep-rallies and Reaganomic politics provided the icing on the cake.

I was more interested in a good book then going to a basketball game, or buying makeup. Whenever my weight dipped from increased activity, the jokes changed from fat jokes to "Amazon"! [related to my near 6 foot height], "nerd", "bookworm" and ---funnily enough--since I was such a wallflower, "goody two-shoes".

Yet I knew all the popular girls puked to keep their figures trim after eating French Fries and 2 pizza squares [a disgusting lunch from the health angle]. My high school bathroom was a nightmare with it's ever pervasive odor of vomit.

Although seen as serious illnesses in the media, anorexia and bulimia garnered a strange respect at my high school: the biggest pukers always had the best reputations. On TV I watched these type of girls martyr themselves as they replayed stories about cutting celery into bite-sized pieces, fighting with their parents over half a sandwich, and fighting to remain under 90lbs for the big national gymnastics meet.

At least their starving earned merit badges as they mutated their bodies into fur-covered non-menstruating sticks, reminding me of saints I read about in Catholic school, who allegedly lived on on communion wafers and small sips of water.

On top of all that, endless books extolled the sufferings of these poor girls who couldn't eat a carrot stick for dinner to save their life! Somehow I was supposed to shed copious tears over The Best Little Girl in the World as it's heroine did many life-threatening exercises to avoid turning into me. Not to deny the seriousness of these problems, but Betty Bulimic and Annie Anorexic had school therapists, groups and parents to save them from the horrors of puking. No such books or movies existed on fat girls except one fat character in the book by Judy Blume called Blubber.

I continually heard the message of a life deferred, this will happen for you when you are the proper size. Talk about setting up false expectations.

"Conspiracy Theory" and Fat; Asking Some Hard Questions

I found this interesting video the other day, tell me what you think. Yes it is on what people call the "conspiracy theory" side of things, you may not agree with everything he brings up, but there is some really creepy things going on with our food! Profit and greed explains a lot of it, but why so many chemicals?. I found his comment about it being some of the substances being poured into our food, being made illegal in other countries to quite revealing, on this blog I have shared my theories about growth hormone already. I found this video on a website, that describes what they think is happening.

Some of these hard questions do need answered. For example why are none of the obesity epidemic researchers who are MAINSTREAM even honestly dealing with the facts of how the American diet has been switched over to being corn based, especially high fructose corn syrup which was used formerly to fatten livestock! In this article he states:

Today, 75% of foods in the grocery store contain at least one corn-based ingredient. Guess what corn does? It makes you fat. That's why cows are fed so much corn; it beefs them up so there's more meat to profit from

.

Then there is the GMOs, and other chemicals. GMO food they have successfully snuck in food with altered DNA, into the food supply, maybe this is some of the cause of rising rates of food allergies and celiac...

So much of our population is getting sick, fat, and just in bad shape. Some of my elderly friends have told me people in their 20s, 30s and 40s are far sicker and chronically ill [even the thin ones] then they were when they were young. I personally know so many people in their early 40s, with cancer it is shocking. While medicine has had some advances, the life expectancy rates in America ARE DROPPING.

I don't buy the normal calories in, calories out onus put on the obese. We have become a sick people. The food has less nutrition. I am telling my husband we need to grow some of our own food and consider getting into a living space where there is either a patio or a small yard instead of an apt without any because anything decent costs so much money but financial pressures leave this change undone.

Our food is being turned into a bunch of toxic trash. I pay $6.00 bucks for a loaf of gluten free bread. I have scary food allergies that have only gotten worse. In cooking things from scratch, one can do better, but now even basic foods like spaghetti sauce have the corn syrup and crap poured in. Buy a package of hummus and you get some yummy sodium benzoate for your trouble, I found it very fascinating its used for fireworks manufacturing too.

One thing about me people may figure out reading this, blog, I do ask some of the hard questions, I am not someone brainwashed by Jenny Craig and or the powers that be that profit off endless human suffering. I believe I stayed alive this long, because I refused to be brushed off, and go home and shut my brain off--[in regards to my 400lb weight gain] where doctors told me I was to blame and to go home and "diet". What a joke before I was diagnosed with severe endocrine problems!

Just even the most basic research brings up some scary things, MSG is one of them. Why is that being poured into almost every food product? Read this article and DO NOT MISS THE SCIENTIFIC STUDIES LISTED TOWARDS THE BOTTOM:

He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called The Slow Poisoning of America. In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies.

No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates, causing rats (and humans?) to become obese; they even have a title for the race of fat rodents they create: “MSG-Treated Rats,,,,,,,, MSG”?

I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge. MSG was in everything! The Campbell’s soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavored potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the ‘healthy low fat’ ones. The items that didn’t have MSG had something called Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate. It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who catch on.

It's there. Try avoiding any of these chemicals, its nearly impossible. By the way, the more expensive a food, the less chemicals, interesting huh?