World’s largest lady needs to half her body weight to realise wedding dreams

A bride-to-be wanting to shed a pound or two so they look their best on the wedding day is about as normal as the groom having no say in the colour of the flower arrangements.

Charity Pierce is taking this one step further though… or perhaps step is the wrong word; Ms Pierce is hoping to lose as much as 20 stone to realise her dream of just walking down the aisle.

The 38-year-old holds the unfortunate title of being ‘the world’s fattest woman’, tipping the scales at 54 and a half stone. Her fiancé Tony Saur is 17 years younger and 30 stone lighter than she is.

The pair’s ambitions to share a first dance together, however, depends on Ms Pierce losing half her body weight just so that she qualifies for a life-saving gastric bypass operation, aka a stomach stapling. If she doesn’t, then the future Mrs Saur, who has been housebound because of her weight and illness since 2001, will have to say the words “I do” from the comfort of her own living room.

Ms Pierce is hoping to appear on American TV show ‘My 600lb Life’ to find the help and money she needs to lose weight. She said: “I’m determined not to have to get married at home – I want to be able to walk up the aisle.

“We both love country music so I plan to wear a wedding dress, cowboy boots and cowgirl hat and Tony will be in jeans and cowboy boots.

“I want a big area, lots of people there and I want to dance all night and have the best honeymoon ever.”

You can see more of her full story in a video by Barcroft TV below.

Image from NY Daily News showing the extent of Silva’s injuries … and his good luck.

A boy in Brazil has miraculously survived falling from a tree and being impaled by a 2ft iron bar.

Earlier this month, Weverton Silva – a 10-year-old boy from Macaé, a city in the Rio de Janeiro state of Brazil – had his left side punctured by a metal spike, which then re-emerged close to his right ear (see x-ray).

The incident happened as Silva fell from a tree while picking guava fruits, landing on a rod that was jutting out of a wall below in the process. Defying all odds, the metal bar somehow missed his heart and lungs as it pierced from one side of his torso to the other.

Fire fighters arrived on the scene and took the boy, with the iron bar still protruding from both sides of his body, to a local hospital. Once in hospital Silva underwent a five-hour operation to have the spike removed by a team of doctors.

One of those doctors, Rodrigo Chicralla, told Brazil’s Globo TV it was a miracle the 10-year-old survived. The bar, which was eventually removed in one piece, only narrowly missed all arteries and vital organs, had it punctured any of these then the accident would have almost certainly proved fatal.

Dr Chicralla said: “[The bar] had passed through basic arterial route. It is difficult to arrive at a hospital with such a situation and survive… I think it was just God [that meant Silva survived the incident].”

Could there really be a link between sexuality and smoking?

A controversial study carried out by an Amsterdam-based neuroscientist claims that smoking and drinking during pregnancy could increase the chances of the baby being gay or having a low IQ.

Dr Dick Swaab, professor of neurobiology at Amsterdam University, has said that smoking, drinking, taking drugs or living in a high-pollution area during pregnancy could all have an impact on the unborn baby and its ongoing development.

Dr Swaab suggests that drinking and drug-taking could serve to lower a baby’s IQ, while taking synthetic hormones and smoking while pregnant could boost the chances of female babies becoming bisexual or gay. He asserts that living in an area that suffers from high levels of pollution while pregnant could increase the chances of the baby becoming autistic in the future.

Dr Swaab told the Sunday Times: “Pre-birth exposure to both nicotine and amphetamines increases the chance of lesbian daughters. Pregnant women suffering from stress are also more likely to have homosexual children of both genders because their raised level of the stress hormone cortisol affects the production of foetal sex hormones.

“In women who drink a lot, cells that were meant to migrate across the foetal brain can end up leaving the brain altogether,” he added.

Dr Swaab did go on to say that genetics play the major role in the development of a child, while lifestyle factors had a small influence.

The largest family in Britain has announced that it is to swell by one more member, when the newest addition is born next April.

Sue Radford and husband Noel are already parents to 16 children and are now expecting baby number 17, just 11 months after their last child, son Caspar was born. They rose to fame when they were featured on the documentary ’15 Kids and Counting’ on Channel 4 in 2011.

The family lives in a former children’s home in Morecambe, Lancashire, and uses a minibus to get around. The children – Chris, 24, Sophie, 19, Chloe, 18, Jack, 16, Daniel, 14, Luke, 12, Millie, 12, Katie, 10, James, nine, Ellie, eight, Aimee, seven, Josh, five, Max, four, Tillie, three, Oscar, two and Casper, 11 months – are all said to be “absolutely thrilled” about their new sibling.

Mrs Radford announced the news on her Facebook page, with the Telegraph reporting her as saying: “We are so excited to announce Radford baby 17 will be joining this family in April. As you can imagine, the children are so excited. Little Tilly said to me: ‘Mummy you have a baby in your tummy’. It was so sweet.”

The Radfords are not the only large family in Britain – Derek and Debbie Simpson, from East Kilbride, have 13 children, while a family in Dundee has 12 children.

Lucky number 13?

A couple from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has welcomed their twelfth son, Tucker – yet again failing to break the gender streak that has made the family famous.

Jay and Kateri Schwandt believed that their twelfth child may be a girl, as Kateri went nine days over her due date, something that had not happened with any of their previous 11 boys. However, Kateri – known as Teri – gave birth to another boy, Tucker, who weighed in at 3.52kg, at a Grand Rapids hospital.

Teri, 38, told The Associated Press: “Of course. There was a chuckle in the whole room. I looked at my husband, and we exchanged a knowing smile. When they say it’s a boy, I think, OK, no problem. I’ve got this. We know what we’re doing.”

The family now has 12 boys aged between 21 and newborn. Devout Roman Catholics who don’t believe in using birth control, the Schwandts come from large families themselves – Teri has 13 siblings and has a sister who is mother to 10 children, all of whom are also boys.

Dr. Bob Barbieri, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told the news source: “That’s amazing. This is a miracle. It appears there is some type of genetic determination in some families that have a lot of girls or a lot of boys. It’s not well understood. It’s more than a statistical oddity.”

Lips.

A New Zealand-based woman accidentally superglued her lips together when she mistakenly applied the glue instead of her lip cream.

The Dunedin resident, 64, reached for what she thought was lip cream in the dark in the middle of the night, and was horrified to discover that it was in fact superglue.

According to the Otago Daily Times, the woman was only able to make grunting sounds on the phone when she called the emergency services to come and help her out of her predicament.

Senior Sergeant Steve Aitken told the publication: “[The] ambulance received a call, but due to the muffled speech, they were unsure whether it was a medical event or whether someone had been gagged.

“Basically, she could only grunt. She got up in the middle of the night, in the dark, and grabbed what she thought was the tube of medication”, Senior Sergeant Aitken went on to say.

As a result of the grunting sound, ambulance staff alerted police who then went directly to the woman’s home. She was admitted to hospital where she received treatment to unglue her lips, and has now been discharged.