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Pauline Potter, who appeared on “My 600-lb Life” in 2015 and once held the world record as the heaviest living woman, has died, according to her son.
Her son, Dillon Brooks, announced the news in a Nov. 29 YouTube video, sharing that she passed more than a week after beginning hospice care.
“August 20th was the last time she was at home, and she has been in the hospital since then,” Brooks said. On Nov. 19, she relocated from a “rehab facility,” where she was admitted for around a month to improve her health so she could potentially undergo surgery, to his aunt’s house.
She died on Nov. 27, Thanksgiving Day, Brooks said.
While she was convalescing at the rehabilitation facility, Books explained, medical professionals told them “there was nothing else they could do for her” and sent her home for hospice care. He also recounted that while she was hospitalized, she was found to have “signs of heart failure and respiratory failure,” and doctors doubted she would “make it much longer.”
Potter’s death came 10 months after “we both got in a pretty bad car accident” on a two-lane highway in California, he explained.
“My injuries weren’t really that severe,” Brooks said, but his mother suffered injuries to her arm as well as what they later learned were broken ribs.
She was hospitalized over the summer because she “could not keep any food down,” and tests found “a blockage in her esophagus” as she also battled COVID-19, Brooks said. At one point, she was in the intensive care unit and also experienced a “severe” infection from a wound on her back.
USA TODAY has reached out to Brooks for more information.
Potter made her TLC debut on Season 3 of “My 600lb Life” in February 2015. She made subsequent appearances on “My 600-lb Life: Where Are They Now?” most recently in 2020.
In 2011, the Guinness Book of Records confirmed Potter as the heaviest living woman, weighing 643 pounds. According to a press release at the time, Potter told the organization that she’d hoped “to get my story out there so that a doctor or nutritionist could help me.”
Potter told the Guinness Book of Records that she believed her condition was due to a combination of genetics as well as a childhood that involved an “overabundance” of food.
She continued to chronicle her weight-loss journey through the years, and in 2020, she shared on Facebook that she was down to 223 pounds.