Yesterday I took the plunge and bought myself one of those ‘memory foam’ beds – you know, the ones you see on TV all the time – I figure at this point I should try anything to help my back and I spend around 8 hours a day sleeping, if I can.
I also bought myself a nice leather Broyhill desk chair and a new computer desk. No more $29 Wal-Mart chair and kitchen table as I spend way too much time in front of the computer. Lets face it; cheap-ass chairs and kitchen tables are not good for the posture.
What makes this kind of ‘dumb’ is that I’ll be moving in a month or two and having to pack it all across town.
See, I’ve never been one for ‘stuff’ and until yesterday everything I own would fit nicely into my car. A big house full of crap that never gets used is really quite alien to me and I therefore try to have the very best things that I really use on a daily basis – which is the argument I used against myself to buy furniture yesterday…
The ‘memory foam’ stuff really works though – it should for what it costs. If you’ve ever spent a night in a feather bed, then you already know what this stuff is like for it is the twenty first century equivalent. It takes about a minute, maybe two, before you are encased in this mattress and immobilized for the night, and you will wake up in the exact same position you went to sleep in.
*** Begin public service announcement…
For my readers who are really into ‘extreme bed sports’, you’ll find that you will hate ‘memory foam’. This stuff was scientifically designed for sleeping on, not performing aerobics on, and therefore it absorbs ‘all’ movement and a body tends to sink about 5 inches or so into it. You would practically have to bungee you and your partner together to get anywhere on this mattress.
So should you decide to purchase said bed, you should keep the old one around for wrestling mat duty. (chuckle)
*** End public service announcement…
For me this works well as the doctor says I am to sleep on my back to help straighten out my spine, which I’ve never been able to do, as I don’t like it, and I always end up elsewhere during the night. With the new bed it makes it a conscious decision to move once the foam has ‘set’, so as I was on my back when I went to sleep I woke up staring at the numbers on the ceiling from my alarm clock.
The down side to this new bed is that getting out of it takes real work – and I don’t mean this in a figurative ‘get your ass out of bed’ way, I mean it in a literal ‘you cannot move from the form-fitting depression you’ve made in the bed’ kind of way. The mattress is also seriously thick, adding about 8 inches to the height of my old bed, which makes that first step in the morning an eye opener.
But, all in all, I woke up feeling pretty good today – my back doesn’t ‘hurt’, it’s just kind of a dull ache, and I slept a solid eight hours for the first time in what feels like months…
And that alone makes the price worth it.