When Jeison Rodríguez has a headache, he knows he’s growing. The least of his problems may be overflowing his shoes or having to bend his head lower to go through a door because his pituitary gland, the growth hormone factory, never stops working. Getting the money to pay for an expensive ampoule every two months – which costs about 1,500 dollars – with which he controls acrogigantism, a chronic endocrine disease of high cost, is what really worries him every day. When he does not take it, the headache comes as a bad sign, the convulsions that make him lose his memory, he has trouble standing and walking because of the unstoppable growth of his body.
At the age of eight, the first pains began. At 10, he began to grow. At 12, he was diagnosed. At that age, he was taller than his mother, wore a size 50 shoe, and was the target of bullying by students at the Palo Negro school in the state of Aragua, in the central region of Venezuela. “They spat on me, kicked me, made fun of me. They called me a freak, a fool.” He tried to commit suicide three times, emotionally broken by the violence and rejection that those who deviate from the norm are often exposed to. The doctors at the time did not give him much hope of life after the diagnosis. He wanted to be a chef, but left his path in the hands of the Christian religion that they profess at home. “I feel privileged, the Lord gave me this large body so that I could preach the word of God. It is not easy to live with this condition, depending on people and the support of my family, but when people approach me to ask for a photo, I talk to them about God,” says the 28-year-old in a telephone conversation from Colombia.
His relationship with his body has changed since 2016, when he was 20 years old, when he received a medal from the Guinness World Records, because he was the man with the largest feet on the planet. He then entered another canon, that of the astonishment that this international organization lives by. By spending four years without taking medicine, he believes that he has already surpassed his own record and that the Guinness people – who then gave him a paper written in English on which it took him a while to understand that there was no cash prize – should measure him again, because now his feet are bigger. At a rate of one size per year, he calculates, his shoes are getting tighter. In 2016, when he was included in the records, his feet measured 40.5 centimeters. Today he says that they are five centimeters taller. That is equivalent to a shoe size 70-72. He is also the tallest man in Latin America, with a height of 2.38 meters and the second tallest in the world.
American Robert Wadlow was the tallest man in the world on record, at least according to Guinness. He lived in Illinois at the beginning of the last century, was 2.72 meters tall, was a circus artist, and died at the age of 22. “Wadlow had the same thing as me: acrogigantism. There are people who only suffer from gigantism and have normal feet, and those who have acromegaly who have a face, hands, and feet as thick as Shrek (the green ogre from the Disney movie),” explains Jeison. In Venezuela, he says, he is the only person with this condition. For a while he received the medicines he needs to stay stable through Social Security. Then the supplies began to fail and they began to give him generics that made him feel worse. Now he looks for them on his own.
Jeison has spent his life dealing with door frames, to the point of suffering from scoliosis from having to bend over every time he crosses them, and weak chairs that don’t support his weight like the cement bed his parents built for him at home in Palo Negro does. But despite this problem of scale, or thanks to it, Jeison became an influencer. Social media is his “little job” for him and through his account @elpieguinnesoficial He has done advertising for technology stores, food businesses and security companies, in which he takes advantage of his size to create optical illusions with the intention of making people laugh. In one of the videos, a store worker pushes with great difficulty a 50-inch television that is then lifted as if it were a folder by Jeison.
![Jeison Rodríguez records advertising videos in a technology store.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/7WMUFX5425BPXEGMVFOXYPM5HI.jpg?auth=7a50808e45bb4d9aa801d2693f6b2350d376e19ba5dee49e99ca77ec8cf6a97c&width=414)
Jeison entered these leagues, those of the giants, looking for shoes. In Venezuela, wearing shoes larger than 45 makes anyone a phenomenon. He doesn’t remember well, because of the difficulties that the convulsions have left him with, but he says that a cousin who was helping him get some shoes contacted the German Georg Wessels, a manufacturer of orthopedic shoes, who for forty years has developed a line for those who suffer from this endocrine disorder and live with feet that are out of shape. In an interview he did this year in Caracas, when he came with three suitcases for three pairs of shoes for Jeison, Wessels said that he has delivered more than 600 to those he calls his friends, “the giants of the world.” On the German orthopedics’ Instagram account he appears in photos with the Turkish Sultan Kösen, who takes first place from Jeison in height by 13 centimeters, and who also holds the record for the largest hands in the world.
Before using the German leather orthopedic shoes, with the proper support to support his 165-kilogram body, Jeison walked around in handmade sandals made of rubber and jean fabric that were not very resistant to the steps of a giant. For a time, he even stopped wearing shoes. The German shoemakers contacted him with Guinness and also organized his first trip outside of Venezuela. He remembers that in 2020 he was in France at the “meeting of the giants,” where he had the opportunity to travel around Europe. “The shoemaker invited me to share myself with the giants, so that I would feel normal, with people bigger than me.”
![Rodriguez shrinks as he walks down a hallway in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 29.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/FEIGSUNVNRGMJBKDZLBXGWXMDA.jpg?auth=5e63f03cc8d76fb77b2afc4e72e7c30267c697a4592aba5b319e071f8a8d5a6b&width=414)
Jeison has been in Barranquilla, Colombia, for a month. He has a performance in the circus of an amusement park that recently opened in the coastal city. Together with two clowns, he does a sketch in which they fight and one calls his little brother to defend him. Behind the curtain, Jeison appears to scare him. He says that all of his performances have been filled. “People don’t believe it. When they see me, they think I’m a puppet, by the grace of God.” Unlike when he received the Guinness, Jeison already has a representative to continue taking advantage of his size in better conditions. This is how he earns his living, but he is always willing to do any “little job” to get money for his medicines. “These are small doors that open for me, that push me to continue, so that later bigger doors open for me.” Ones that he can go through.
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