Going to the Mattresses: My Quest for a New Bed to Help my Chronic Pain

I need a new bed. More specifically, I need a new mattress, and as my current bed frame is a double XL, and there isn’t a lot of choice in that category, I decided to go for a whole new bed. I had a couple of requirements: a double bed, no higher than 22 inches (reason below), fairly soft to make my Fibro-and RA-riddled body happy. You’d think that wouldn’t be too difficult. 

You’d be wrong.

Cue entry into a rabbit hole of confusion, frustration, and ridiculous expense. This particular adventure can be loosely categorized into the following categories:

Height issues

This is a combination of my height versus the height of the beds. I’m fairly short (5’2” on a good day), and beds have become quite high. High enough that people below the size of an NBA player would need to jump into these monstrosities, or require a footstool or ladder.

Since I use a standing pivot transfer to move from my chair to another surface, my butt was significantly below that of the surface of many of the beds. Which means they were not accessible for me to try.

This significantly reduced the number of options.

A foamy morass

There are precious few mattresses that are simply spring coil these days. Or rather, inner coil as they are now called. And what I found is entirely too firm for me. If you want anything that soft, you have to include memory foam. Sometimes in a coil with foam, but foam is everywhere. Foam, foam, foam. Either as a topper of memory foam, or the entire mattress is foam.

On the surface, you’d think this was exactly what I needed. Foam is softer, right? Well, yes and no.

On one of our excursions to a place that had mattresses, we brought along my mother who needed to replace a crappy one. She found one that was wonderful, bought it, and waited impatiently for the delivery. When it came, the mattress was as hard as wood. After the fact, the salesperson told her it needed to be “broken in.”

Much later, another salesperson told us that memory foam mattresses need to be broken in. That essentially the foam is all closed up, and the pressure of your body as you move on it breaks open the foam and that’s when the softness happens. This process usually takes at least a month, but sometimes up to six months.

Given how sensitive my Fibro body is, memory foam is a bad idea. I’ve gotten wrecked from lying on one of these mattresses for 10 minutes, nevermind an entire night. Except memory foam is the only thing that’s as soft as I need. Supposedly, you can break up the foam faster by moving around on it on your hands and knees, or, if you like me have a pair of active twin niece and nephew, getting them to roughhouse on it. That’s a big risk to take, though.

And then there’s the smell

Something else happens when the foam breaks open. It releases a gas. This process is known as offgassing, and in is anathema to every person with asthma and allergies out there (I’m one of them). Because it smells. And that induces asthma attacks. If you live in a house with a cold basement or a porch, you can attack the thing there and let it off gas before you finally move it into your bedroom. I live in a one-bedroom apartment.

And did I mention the hotness?

Foam tends to be hot. I’ve always been pretty warm at night, usually sleeping with my feet outside the covers. Then menopause happened with nocturnal hot flashes. I need a bed that sleeps cool. 

Enter special designs that somehow makes the foam sleep cool, except I’m not sure I believe it. Especially because all of these mattresses are covered with that velvety polyester material that is by definition warm.

What about latex?

Latex mattresses, such as the Casper, are all the bomb these days, supposedly moulding to your body and also supposedly excellent for people with pain.

I’m allergic to latex.

Tempur-Pedic gets its own category

Everything I’ve read about mattresses and chronic pain mentions Tempur-Pedic. I looked at their website, and decided what I needed was a mattress in the ES class, which is softer than many of the others. The problem with mattresses is that they are also higher than others (see height issues above). After a couple of frustrated excursions to unhelpful places, we went to The Brick. We get there, looked at the Tempur-Pedic’s lined up three in a row. Unfortunately, they were the TEMPUR-Flex, but it was worth a try.

 

The softest mattress was too high, so I decided to try the one I could get into, to attempt to guess whether that would work. It wouldn’t. But while lying there, I took a look at the other beds and asked whether we can push them together.

We could. First pushing the firm to the medium-firm, and then the medium-firm to the medium-soft. And then I slowly inched my way along the velvety polyester fabric, sort of like a sideways inchworm. I made it to the medium and that didn’t work, then made my way to the medium-soft version. Not soft enough.

And then I had to inch my way back across 15 feet of velvety material that afforded such a level of friction that my pants almost came off!

I did some more research and discovered that The Bay had the ES line. I called, and they were willing to arrange moving mattresses around. However, they only had the soft Tempur-Pedic, because anything softer than that was too soft to sell much. Although the mattress was fairly comfortable, it was obvious that I needed to go at least a level softer. But even if that could be achieved, there are three other significant issues.

One is the gully. Because memory foam mattresses adapt to your body, essentially creating a you-sized shape in the mattress and that can be hard to get out of, especially for people with limited mobility.

The second is that the memory foam would probably make this mattress sleep fairly hot. Problem three is that Tempur-Pedic are known for offgassing for quite a while.

Where am I now?

A bit stuck. All I want is to go back in time and pick between a firm, medium, and soft spring mattress that I could then bring back to the present.

More to come.