A little off the top

Posted on February 24, 2005 by Gene

If Jann reads this, I’m gonna get an angry phone call, but hey — I paid for it.
My mattress, I mean. A year or so ago, I bought a new bedroom set, a really nice Craftsman set, through Jann’s boyfriend who works at JC Penney. Jann picked out a mattress set for me and shipped it; it’s a biggish box spring and an absolutely enormous mattress, one of those pillow tops that’s about 4 feet thick. Since I got it, it’s been like sleeping way up on a top bunk, it’s so high off the ground that I have a chair next to the bed so that Diego can make two leaps and get up onto it.
I’ve also been having back problems, poor circulation, neck spasms, and headaches when I wake up. It never occurred to me that it could be the mattress, which is very very soft and cushy.
Last week, I tried a little experiment: I turned the mattress upside down and slept on the bottom of it, a much firmer surface, kind of a hard foam. My headaches and stiff neck didn’t go away completely, but my back was much better.
So, I made a drastic decision. This morning, I performed surgery on my mattress.
Whoa, you say — that wasn’t a cheap mattress there! But hey, I say: if I do move away, I’m not hauling a mattress and box spring across country; and no one wants to buy a used mattress. So, I got out the x-acto knife… and cut off the pillow top.
I expected it to be a one piece thing filled with foam, but in fact, it turned out to be a couple of layers. The pillow top itself was just what you’d think: a foam-filled mini-mattress, completely self-contained. But underneath the pillow top was yet another piece of foam, the kind with little “egg cups”. I’d been sleeping on multiple foam layers on top of an already soft mattress.
I’ve left one layer of foam in place and ditched the pillow top; it’s now comfy but firm. If it’s still not firm enough, I can remove the last layer of foam later.
And all without a surgery residency.