Another day at the doa

Chapter 1: Another Day...

Jessica Stausel loved her job. How could she not? She’d been lucky enough to snag it right out of med school, back when she was horrendously in debt and desperate to pay her bills and make her rent on time. It might have seemed like an odd specialty within the medical field, but Jessica still valued her work and what she accomplished on a daily basis. Just as eager and enthusiastic to be in the office on a Thursday morning as she would have been at Disneyland, she picked up the phone ringing at her desk and prepared herself for the first call of the day.

“Department of Obesity Assistance, this is Jessica speaking!”

Working for the DOA had never been Jess’s dream, obviously… But there was no denying how effortlessly the perky and punctual blonde had settled into her role. Always a very pretty and outgoing girl, Jess had initially desired to apply her impeccable bedside manner to the physically rehabilitated. She was great with people, had always been told so, and had a particular empathy for those who had been the tragic victims of events that had rendered their bodies incapable of unassisted movement.

People confined to wheelchairs, paraplegics, amputees and all, Jessica had always had a strong desire to turn her attention there, to help individuals that had been the unfortunate victims of accidents learn to function on their own again.

And helping the very morbidly obese to function as a part of their everyday lives… was surprisingly similar. Many of the clients that she saw come in and out of her clinic could barely walk. Most of them used either canes or scooters. The ones that didn’t looked sorely as though they needed them… Jessica was indeed beginning to develop a soft spot for the super morbidly obese.

Of course, it did help that Jessica was beginning to fall into that very category herself. The very heavy, very fat young woman had certainly taken advantage of the perks of her position. The bubbly blonde might have started off her career at the DOA as a fairly chubby twenty-something year old, but a solid five years under her belt at the office had ended up leading to… well, a much longer belt. Jessica had begun to reach a level of fat where she was difficult to recognize to people who had only ever known her before she’d landed her job. She was big enough to require quite a few of the DOA’s services, and only seemed to need even more obesity-related assistance as the number on the scale soared well past the four and five hundreds and into the sixes.

But, compared to the average client who came through the clinic’s double doors, Jessica was an absolute twig. It was what had allowed her to stay mostly oblivious to how obese she was for such a long time. On the outside world, Jessie would waddle and wobble around the city, almost always being the fattest person in any given room that she was in. But at work… Jessica was the model of health and self-restraint, a well-oiled albeit well-padded angel of assistance, always eager to help a big-bellied or thunder-thighed stranger get back on their feet and out of their scooters. It was the sole reason why Jessica didn’t use a scooter herself. She wanted to serve as living example to her clients, that they too could carry an exorbitant amount of weight but still function as productive members of society, could become engineers and doctors and lawyers, etcetera. Being incredibly obese had nothing to do with being incredibly lazy, and Jessica strived to serve as living proof of that.

She couldn’t be so sure about a lot of her clients though… A lot of them seemed far from motivated to lose weight. Most of them weren’t making much of an active attempt, although Jess could hardly put herself in a position to criticize, lest she be forced to call herself a hypocrite. Jessica hadn’t made any earnest attempt to stop gaining weight since she got her job, far more inclined with taking advantage of the comforts and privileges her company gave her access to.

There was hardly any burden that came along with Jessica’s formidable size. Every issue that she had, the DOA dealt with. When she had griped about needing a larger swivel chair to accommodate her swelling behind, the DOA had complied. When her belly had gotten too big for her to fit comfortably into her car without the steering wheel digging deeply into her upper stomach roll, the DOA had gotten her more spacious transportation. When she had gotten too fat to squeeze through the doorways of her apartment even when she turned sideways, the DOA had provided her with housing, had even paid for the moving company that Jessica had thought she would need to hire out of pocket.

Jessica could always count on the DOA to ensure that she never needed to care about how the impact of her growth affected her day to day life. And because of that, she hadn’t stopped growing…

Not that she’d reached the exorbitant levels of obesity that she’d seen from her clients on a daily basis. The people who either waddled or wheeled through the building were so beyond any level of chub that Jessica could ever think to achieve that she felt positively svelte at six hundred and thirty pounds… at least whenever she was in her usual company.

Case in point, the young and very fretful dark-haired latina woman with sunglasses waddling up to her desk at that very moment…

“Hi,” Jessica greeted the woman with a big, beaming smile. “I’ll be right with you in just a moment,” she assured the exhausted, worried and wary-looking woman before returning to her phone call. She used the few extra seconds on the phone as an opportunity to look her first patient of the day over, trying to anticipate what type of assistance she’d likely be providing.

What Jessica took first notice of was the fact that the girl wasn’t using a cane or a scooter, although she desperately looked like she needed one, at least for now. She was instead leaning on the top of Jessica’s concierge desk, panting loudly while she struggled to both keep her balance and take even just a fraction of weight off of her punished feet. The girl looked to be even younger than Jessica was, even though she was noticeably much bigger. Leaning onto the desk the way she was, her deep, expansive cleavage looming inches away from Jessica’s fluffy face, Jess might have made the mistake of thinking that the buxom and brown-skinned woman was more top-heavy at first, but there was far more to drink in once the woman took a few exhausted steps back in order to try to pull her dark blue tank top down over her partially exposed middle.

‘Those hips…’ Jessica thought to herself while listening to whomever was on the other end of the phone prattle on about making an appointment. ‘She might need a door widening or armrest removal…’ the porcine practitioner silently surmised. Indeed, the woman might have been unquestionably, undeniably fat all over, but her hips and behind were so extraordinary that she remained a very exaggerated pear shape despite wearing bras with cup sizes that must have exclusively utilized the second half of the alphabet.

Jessica thought to offer the woman a seat, but the woman had already resumed leaning heavily against her desk, lightly fanning herself with one chubby hand as though that might have helped with her frazzled recuperation. Her forehead shone slick with sweat; Jessica took note of the fact that it wasn’t a particularly hot day and that the woman was only dressed in her dark blue tank top and a massively oversized pair of light blue leggings, neither article of clothing fitting quite just right and neither item particularly insulatory. This woman really was completely worn out just from the act of waddling from outside and into the building.

Soft-guessing her patients’ weights was a pretty typical part of Jessica’s job, and she’d gotten to the point where she felt pretty confident with it. This bottom-heavy whale of a woman must have had at least 250 pounds on her, making her around the average weight of the patients Jessica saw on a normal basis; shocking as anything in the outside world, but hardly worth turning a head within the confines of the DOA.

The comparatively less corpulent blonde took a few more moments to jot down some information to finish scheduling a different patient’s appointment for later on that week. Only after hanging up the phone with a soft *click* did she look back up to address the woman in front of her.

“Hello,” she greeted, catching the still slightly panting woman’s attention, “are you here by appointment?”

“I uh-” the woman hesitated for a second, standing up straight again and shifting her immense weight from one foot to another. She likely wasn’t built to stand for very long; Jessica could hear just the slightest tint of flustered urgency in her voice, as though the poor, ludicrously lardy latina was desperate to sit down and take the weight of her burdensome body off of her dainty but plump feet. But Jessica could hear something else in the girl’s voice; there was also something somewhat… familiar about it.

“Yes,” the fatter, tanner woman stammered, sounding somewhat nervous on top of being exhausted. It was almost as though she were embarrassed to be in the lobby that morning, her one word answer tinged with just a hint of reluctance. She fiddled with her sunglasses as her gaze strafed off to either side, as though she were casing the room to see if there were anyone to overhear her. “Marlena McGuire… I’m for nine thirty, I think?”

Jessica looked down at her daily itinerary and, sure enough, Marlena McGuire was the first name listed. The bulging blonde’s eyes lingered on the name for a few seconds while she pondered to herself for a moment. Had she ever seen that name before?

Choosing not to make much else of it, Jessica instead returned to meet Ms. McGuire’s gaze and showed her a soft, warm smile. She could tell that the woman seemed nervous to be here; most first-timers were, and there was no prior record of a Marlena McGuire visiting either this DOA or any of their affiliate offices.

“Alright,” Jessica did her best to sound inviting to put her new patient at ease. “I’ll just need to see your driver’s license or another form of identification in order to enter you into our system.”

“Okay…” the woman nodded hesitantly but compliantly, fishing into a small purse at her side with one tanned, flabby arm.

Jessica had learned over the years to ask for a driver’s license OR another form of government I.D., given that so many of her charges were too fat to drive and didn’t have current licenses for that reason.

Marlena was apparently one such charge. The license that she produced for Jessica had expired nearly six years ago; Jessica would have to let her prodigiously pear-shaped patient know that they unfortunately required a more up to date one.

The even younger woman in the license photo Jessica was scanning was noticeably much thinner than the woman who had handed the expired license to her; it was easy to tell that a great deal of the weight that this woman was carrying had been gained fairly recently.

The license also must have been from before Marlena had gotten married; it had what Jessica assumed was the woman’s maiden name: Marlena Santos.

‘Wait…’ that was when something suddenly clicked. Marlena Santos. Born 1993… so, that meant that both women were actually the same age. And, being able to see a picture of the thinner Marlena without those purposefully obstructive sunglasses on…

“No way…” Jessica blurted out loud, forgetting to keep her thoughts contained in her sudden surprise.

“I-is something not okay?” Marlena hazarded to ask, not entirely sure what had caused Jessica to become so taken aback. “I know the license has my non-married name, but it-”

“NO WAY!!” Jessica mistakenly interrupted the fatter woman, looking up to meet her shielded eyes with an even bigger smile this time. “Lena Santos?!” she exclaimed loudly. “From high school?!?!”

The latina woman’s jaw dropped as she blushed furiously. She appeared to attempt to form a couple of words to express her surprise, but, clearly mortified at having been recognized, instead turned clumsily on her heel and began speed waddling her way back out of the office as fast as her criminally corpulent frame would allow her to.

Luckily, that wasn’t terribly fast. Lena had already been out of breath just leaning on Jessica’s desk, no doubt due to the hundreds upon hundreds of extra pounds piled onto her frame, and attempting anything other than a laboriously slow, meandering waddle was far too challenging for the poor, obscenely obese woman to manage. She tried to tuck her head down and shield her face with one hand as she wobbled back toward the front entrance.

“W-wait,” Jessica frowned. “Remember me? From marching band?” She found herself slowly getting up from her custom-ordered double-wide office chair, both hands pressed against her concierge desk for leverage and support. Jessica wasn’t a particularly fast woman, either… but she still didn’t intend to let a patient in need walk out of her sight and safety.