Would you accommodate her if she had a different 'condition'?

mrsconn23 · June 2024

Dear Prudence,

I love my sister but over the past few years, she has grown morbidly obese. She can barely walk and needs to sit down every few moments. She isn’t even 40 yet and she moves like our late grandmother. My cousin and I had plans this summer to go to New York City and sightsee, which involves several walking tours. My sister wants to join us and foolishly thinks that she will be able to keep up. The last time I visited her, we took her dog on a walk to the park. We didn’t even make it before my sister got fatigued. I had to turn around and get the car to get her home. I am not mentioning her weight to her. It wouldn’t do any good but hurt her feelings. I don’t want to exclude my sister but I am not shelling out thousands of dollars for a trip to be stuck in a hotel room with her. How do I have this conversation with her?

—Walk Around

charlotte989875 · June 2024

Sounds like she invited herself, which puts you in a tough spot. If you said yes then try and find ways to accommodate her. Maybe swap a walking tour for a site seeing bus once. Or tell her how much walking to expect on the tours and let her decide if she can manage or if she wants to skip it or get mobility aids. You don’t have to completely change your plans (and you should t) but be upfront about what they are and be willing to do some things that she is interested and able to do too.

short+sassy · June 2024

What I remember about NYC is that it is a LOT of walking! It's walking from your hotel to the subway station. It's walking from your hotel to eat a meal at one of the gazillion delicious places and the further you are willing to walk, the more choices you have.

The LW needs to be very blunt with her sister about the things they will be doing, including the general walking around that happens in a city like NY. The LW doesn't need to and shouldn't mention the weight. It's really about the physical limitations. If her sister says, "Yeah, it's cool, I can keep up," the LW should remind her about the dog walking incident where they had to go get their car.

If it's a good ways into the future, there's a chance the sister can get into better physical shape if she has the motivation. Because let me tell ya as a former morbidly obese person myself, exercising didn't really help me lose weight but it did increase my stamina. I wasn't in as good of a shape as my traveling companions for various trips, but I could still walk at least 15-20 minutes without having to stop for a quick break. Though stairs and inclines are extra challenging because I'm short, so it's even more effort for me to get very far.

Looking at you Seattle, with your 45-degree angled streets to get from the waterfront to the main drags.

I also had a NYC trip where I fell within two hours of our arriving and badly sprained my knee cap. Walking was painful and I had to constantly walk sideways up/down all those subway steps. We went to two museums on that first day and had to borrow a wheelchair from them, so my H could push me around.

100% do not recommend visiting NYC if it's painful or difficult to walk around, lol.

As an aside, people always talk about how mean and rude NYers are, but that has never been my experience. Because of the bad limp I had, I was almost always offered a seat on the subway when it was full.

levioosa · June 2024

This is hard. I've been in this situation. It really did impact the trip. We had to make special accommodations for this person, and they really had no cares for how it was impacting the rest of the group and even got snippy with us. It was in DC so also a ton of walking. Most of the rest of our group was also in the overweight/obese category at the time, so overall it wasn't like we were a bunch of marathon runners who were crazy in shape and being overzealous. But having to stop every half block and wait for 10 minutes was way too much. Eventually we had to have the hard conversation that we were planning on doing X thing in Y timeframe, and if they didn't feel up to it they were welcome to meet us there and take a cab or uber, or they could sight see at their own pace and we could meet up later. We were trying so so so hard not to fat shame or make this person feel bad, but we could not spend another hour trying to walk less than a mile. We all traveled across the county and spent a ton of money to be there. It was a friend of a friend's daughter (the youngest of all of us, too) who was struggling so much. I remember before we left my friend was a little distressed and uneasy because she already knew this was going to be an issue, but there was no way to tell her friend that the daughter either wasn't welcome, or needed to do things at her own pace without impacting the group.

MNNEBride · June 2024

This is a hard conversation, but there are lots of options here. My DH has many mobility issues and we spent 3 days in NYC before our Canadian cruise last year. We rented a mobility scooter to be delivered to the hotel and he used that wherever we went. We also used Ubers that could accommodate the scooter. It can be done. However, friend has to be willing to have these accommodations and other travelers have to be willing work within the limits.