FDNY Rescues 910 Pound Woman From Her Apartment [Photos]

New York firefighters rescued a 910 pound woman from the window of her second story apartment in East Harlem after discovering she was too big to fit through her front door.

via Mail Online:

City paramedics arrived at the apartment of Marie Bowman, 70, on 111th Street around 1.15pm Friday and quickly realized that she was too large to fit through the front door of the dwelling.

The emergency workers were able to treat the retiree but they called in the firefighters so she could be removed from the apartment, which she hadn’t left in almost a year, using a crane and net.

After being taken to hospital. Bowman tearfully told that New York Post that she felt like part of a ‘three-ring circus’ during the embarrassing event and now wants to lose the weight.

The FDNY workers performed a ‘high angle operation’ in order to secure the ‘larger patient’ and take her from the building safely after removing a window, the New York Daily News reported. 

A large net was placed around her body and she was lowered into an ambulance below.  

Witnesses who saw the massive rescue operation estimated Bowman’s weight to be 800lb, though she is actually 910lb.

‘I had grown too big. And that was frightening, because you don’t think, never once, that I wouldn’t be able to get through my door,’ she told the New York Post from her hospital bed on Saturday.

‘This is my life, not a show. I want to live. I’m here in the hospital because I want to live,’ she said.

She said she felt like a spectacle when she was lowered to the ground by the crane and netting in front of a crowd that gathered. 

Bowman said that she last left the apartment in September 2014 before losing her ability to walk, according to the Post.

She was helped by daily visits from aides as her weight ballooned before calling 911 on Friday.

Doctors said Bowman suffers from lymphedema, where damage to the lymphatic system causes fluid to build up in cells such as fat cells and cause swelling.

She also told the Post that she has suffered numerous tragic events in her life, including two failed marriages and the death of her mother, grandmother and son within a roughly two year period between 1999 and 2001.

Her son and only child had been a security guard at the World Trade Center but was not working on September 11 however he was killed in a motorcycle accident a month later aged 19.

Bowman says that she hopes with help from doctors she will be able to walk again. 

Marie is in our prayers.