Walking the dog requires pants. It might only take you 5 seconds to pull on a pair of pants, but it's several minutes of huffing and puffing and struggling for Big Al. LOL
Seriously, though, you'd think she would want to wear pants. I know she doesn't move around much at home, but fat thighs rubbing together when she does have to move sounds painful. At least pants would make waddling more comfortable.
So, let me explain why chub rub is not a problem when you get to AL's level of obesity combined with lymphedema.
Take your average 200-300 pound woman. When she walks, her legs rub together and she develops heat rash, friction rash, chub rub, whatever you want to call it. It happens because even though there is not enough clearance for her legs to move forward or backward without being slightly impeded, they can still make the typical walking motion with reasonable ease and friction results.
AL does not experience friction when she walks anymore. Her legs do not move in the way even a very obese woman's legs move. Her leg fat and lymph pockets are so severe that they cause tissue overlap. When she attempts to swing her right leg forward to walk, her left leg is forced to go with it. That is why she engages in that side to side waddle - she's forced to literally heave her body forward on one side and then the other in order to move. Her legs cannot move back and forth so she does not experience friction. Legs like that are extremely hard to dress - getting pants on for AL probably feels like what I feel when I finish a 45 minute run. Dressing exhausts her, that is, if she is able to do it on her own in the first place. That and lymph leakage may be why she doesn't wear pants, along with the expense of finding pants to fit.
But she is suffering from pain from the skin between her legs. Skin and tissue mashed together like that does bring another whole host of problems. This is gross so stop reading now if you are easily freaked out.
Women who cannot move their legs back and forth in the typical human gait due to extreme obesity have terrible problems with yeast and bacterial infections forming in fat folds. AL has visible skin folds on her legs, and when you can't move your legs apart, bacteria and yeast infections will form where skin is forced to touch all the time.
Worse is urine scald. AL's groin area has folds. It's hard to know if she is there yet but many women at her size can no longer sit on a toilet and urinate properly because skin folds around the thighs and enlarged labia channel urine off into those folds. People as obese as AL find keeping clean a challenge in the first place and removing urine from those folds is extremely difficult, especially with those little t-rex arms that can barely reach around to fasten a bra. The urine causes skin breakdown - think of what would happen to a baby whose urine, even dried, stayed on her skin for 24 hours. Urine scald would make wearing pants unbearable but would also make washing the affected area and wearing pants unbearable.
I hate that I know all this but half of my family decided it was cute and empowering to eat themselves into immobility and the grave. I believe fat people should have dignity in life but once you edge past 300 pounds you rob yourself of all dignity because there can be no dignity if you cannot move your legs to walk properly, are winded from dressing, cannot keep yourself clean or even urinate properly. One female relative needed a catheter to avoid the issues that come up when urinating when so obese but even the most dedicated bariatric nurse needed two other people to help her insert it and homecare situations often do not have the number of people onhand to perform a duty one nurse does in minutes on a fit patient. FA/HAES idiots talk about their agency, that they have the right to look as they want, to reject health as they want, but they all want dignity and to be respected. How can you have dignity when you can't even pee without continual medical intervention because you refuse to stop eating? AL is facing a terrible storm, if it isn't already upon her.
