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My Mattress Hates MeJune 15, 2006 Sunday morning I woke up with monumental lower back pain. Took several hours to work out of it, and until then my butt felt like it was sticking out like a bustle. Which it wasn't visually, but still I felt lousy from the waist down. Couldn't blame it on cramps, or menopause, or a long day in the saddle. Sunday night I couldn't find a comfortable position to sleep in. This is highly unusual: I fall asleep fast and hard and rarely wake before morning unless Rhodry wants out. By Monday morning I knew: my mattress had turned against me. True, my mattress is almost nine years old, but I flip it regularly, both back to front and side over side, and I secretly hoped it would live forever, or at least until I had enough money to replace it. Monday I flipped the mattress again; that helped some, but not enough. It dawned on me that the lower-back stiffness I'd been feeling off and on for the last two or three months probably had the same cause. Stretching exercises, working out with my balance ball, and horseback riding helped a lot, but they were barely offsetting the overnight mischief of my mattress. This week it started to get scary. Several times I'd get up from the editorial chair, lie on the floor, and bend my knees, pressing my lower back against the carpeted but very firm surface. That felt wonderful -- for as long as it lasted. Several hundred times I'd think about the back problems that seem to run in my family but to which I've so far been immune. All of a sudden I was walking around feeling like my grandmother and my father looked. All these years I've been thinking it was because they were careless about lifting in their younger days. It'll never happen to me, I thought; didn't I learn to lift correctly way back in high school, when my summer job involved making hay? Hah. Maybe they too were the victims of malevolent mattresses. Maybe they were too cheap to buy new ones. I've got the family cheap genes for sure and I'm grateful; if I didn't, I wouldn't have enough money to buy groceries. But enough is enough. My tolerance for constant pain, even relatively low level pain, is not great. Today I met the last desperately approaching deadline on the current horizon (next job arrives next Tuesday, and through mid-July the schedule looks full but not frantic -- whew). Tomorrow I'm going mattress shopping. Good mattresses are not cheap, and already this week I've shelled out $300 to my mechanic and $200 to my dentist. But I've started to dread going to bed. This is not good. Ordinarily I love to slide under the covers and fall asleep at the end of the day. I love to wake up in the morning hale and strong and eager to get moving. Whatever the verdict, it's going to seem a hell of a lot cheaper than the alternative.
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