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Sunday, July 20, 2025

600-pound man seeks help for surgery

by

Soyini Grey
1730 days ago
20201024
Marrion Rogers at his Princes Town home yesterday.

Marrion Rogers at his Princes Town home yesterday.

Abraham Diaz

Soyi­ni Grey

“I didn’t eat my­self to this. I am not a glut­ton.”

Mar­rion Rogers, 48, is fight­ing for his life.

He weighs over 600 pounds and is des­per­ate­ly try­ing to fund the gas­tric by­pass surgery he be­lieves will save his life. Af­ter a life­time spent fight­ing his weight, he be­lieves this is his last chance.

Be­fore he lost the abil­i­ty to walk unas­sist­ed, Rogers worked as a bounc­er. It’s a job where his large size was an as­set. Now he has to use a walk­er. He jokes that he has been train­ing for life un­der the pan­dem­ic for a while since he rarely left home ex­cept to go to church. Now that church­es are closed, he is stuck at home.

His wife Shantel Stephens-Roger kept a close watch through­out the in­ter­view. When he got emo­tion­al re­count­ing his strug­gles with his weight, she teared up as well lis­ten­ing in from the kitchen.

“It is very emo­tion­al be­cause I see him try­ing. I see him putting in the work and stuff like that. I just want the best for him,” she says.

Rogers says his bat­tle be­gan when he was 13, and re­quired med­ical care. The doc­tors then com­ment­ed on his weight, at 300 pounds but it nev­er kept him back. He al­ways played sports, in­clud­ing foot­ball, bas­ket­ball and ta­ble ten­nis. Obe­si­ty runs in his fam­i­ly, but oth­er than his weight, his health is good. He does not have di­a­betes.

In 2012, he de­vel­oped a re­cur­ring ab­scess in his right leg which caused his blood pres­sure to spike. He on­ly be­gan treat­ing it three months ago, and his blood pres­sure is im­prov­ing.

He says he has been put in con­tact with a doc­tor who can per­form his surgery.

How­ev­er, fi­nanc­ing it will be a strug­gle.

“I am a graph­ic de­sign­er, self-taught. I’m a chef, self-taught, so you find for the month I would throw like a bar­beque, or I would do a chi­nee-que and try to raise some mon­ey or...and well now the graph­ic de­sign isn’t mak­ing a lot of mon­ey, or any mon­ey at all,” he says.

Rogers needs to raise $150,000 which will cov­er both his pre-sur­gi­cal screen­ings and the surgery it­self.

He is thank­ful to his friends and fam­i­ly for their sup­port.

His wife says, “I see how he fights. And when­ev­er he gets up, my heart starts to pound. I want to make sure that noth­ing is in his way, any­thing like that.”

He says the So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Don­na Cox reached out twice to help him. When Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed the min­is­ter, she con­firmed this, but said that she con­tact­ed him in her per­son­al ca­pac­i­ty, and is do­ing what she can to as­sist.

The Go­FundMe ac­count can be ac­cessed at - go­fundme.com/f/med­ical-ex­pens­es-for-gas­tric-by­pass-surgery. It has on­ly raised US$330 of the US$12,000 so far.

Any­one wish­ing to help can al­so con­tact Mar­rion Rogers di­rect­ly by call­ing 324-4452.


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