I live close to this guy (Dundas is actually part of Hamilton) and was on the doctor's waiting list at one point in my life.
I just found an update on the story.....dated April 26 2007
He didn't want to be a fat man anymore.
Tipping the scales at more than 500 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame, Jamie Bogart was dying to be thin. But for years, the Ontario government ignored his pleas for help in battling his morbid obesity, turning down his requests for American treatment and leaving him to fight his disease on his own.
At one desperate point in 1999, he told the Sun in a front page story that without help, he was destined to eat himself to death.
Last week, his grim prediction came true.
On Friday, the 45-year-old Dundas man died from complications of being grossly overweight -- a death his brother blames directly on Queen's Park.
"If they had looked at obesity in a more serious manner, he would be alive," insists a grieving Perry Bogart. "Instead, they just push it off to the side."
He wants his brother's death to be a wake up call.
At every turn these days, we are bombarded with dire warnings about the obesity epidemic. An estimated 160,000 Ontarians are considered morbidly overweight. And yet instead of treating their chronic illness as something as deadly as cancer or heart disease, too often the obese are left to battle the bulge on their own -- with few resources and little success.
"He's a good example of the situation we have in Ontario right now in the care of people with morbid obesity," complains Bogart's physician, Dr. Arya Sharma. "There are no services for people like Jamie who have been struggling virtually throughout their lives, there are no specialty clinics, there are no facilities where someone like him can go to."
And without specialists' help, "you're dead," he says.
"What is forgotten is that obesity kills people and if we don't take obesity seriously as a disease, then we don't do justice to these people."
The National Eating Disorder Information Centre said 98% of all diets fail. Bogart tried them all -- from the grapefruit diet to Weight Watchers, all with limited results.
Back in 1999, he believed that only a four-week residential fat farm in North Carolina would cure his binge eating, but OHIP refused to cover the $7,000 US cost. "If I don't do something, I'm going to lose my life," he warned at the time. "This is an addiction. I'm 37 and I would like to see 38."
Instead, he only made it to 45.
In recent years, he had lost 100 pounds under the care of Sharma, a world-renowned obesity expert at McMaster University, and a team including a psychiatrist, internist, endocrinologist, social worker, occupational therapist and dietitian. The program, which has 600 patients on the 18-month waiting list, is not covered by OHIP and so it cost Bogart $2,700 a year from his own pocket to shed those pounds.
But it was not enough. At 419 pounds, he still needed surgery.
Bogart should have had gastric bypass surgery long ago, Sharma says, but the waiting list stretches on for years. At one stage, patients were waiting more than a decade for the procedure, while even now the stomach stapling operation can take four years to secure -- and often only across the border.
A 2005 report estimated that Ontario needs to do 3,500 gastric bypass surgeries a year to meet the demand. Instead, it pays for just 508, with about half done out of the country. "It's just not acceptable," Sharma insists.
And Bogart refused to accept that it was. He was a vocal advocate for the obese, intent on fighting government indifference and society's blame for a disease that was not his fault.
He bravely spoke of the stares he would get at his local pool where he would swim several times a week. "It's like they can't believe that there's a man of this size that exists," said Bogart, who lived on a disability pension. "There are a lot of cruel people out there who don't understand the problem of obesity."
Suffering from diabetes, kidney failure and open leg sores, he was a drowning man searching for a life jacket.
"The government is more apt to throw you an anchor than give you the support that is desperately needed for me and others to survive this problem."
With 20% of Ontario children now obese and help so scarce, his doctor worries that death rates will only increase.
"If we don't get our act together in treatment, we're going to be seeing a lot of Jamies," Sharma warns. "It's scary and it's frustrating for anybody who is trying to help because you see the need, we know it's not rocket science to provide the treatment that helps, but without the resources, you can't do it."
After years of waiting, Bogart finally received notice that OHIP will pay for him to meet with an American surgeon to see if he's a candidate for gastric bypass surgery. The letter arrived three days after he died.
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