I guess I'll try to do this right

Discussions General Mattresses Questions
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For weeks, I have been overloading myself with information about latex mattresses. Four times in the past week, I thought I knew what I wanted, only to realize that I don’t know anything, and I needed to go back to the drawing board. Ultimately, I decided to read some of the posts on this site, and I now realize I need to slow down and do some homework. I want to buy a mattress really badly, but I’m going to try to resist the temptation to do something rash.

My situation is this. Last year, I had an accident and paralyzed myself from the chest down. It turns out that one of the complicated problems associated with spinal cord injury is that you have to worry more about pressure relief when sleeping. This is starting to become a real problem for me, and I have come to the conclusion that a latex mattress may be the answer, but I have 2 critical requirements.

1.) I need to be able to sleep on my side. Sitting in a wheelchair all day puts constant pressure on my butt, and I need to give it a rest at night by sleeping on my side. I’m currently using my old, worn out pocketed coil mattress with a 3" partial latex topper. The topper makes it workable, but it could be a lot better. My shoulder is still sore when I wake up, and that’s not good when you rely on your arms to get around.

2.) I have to be able to move around on the mattress. My legs don’t work, so to move around on the mattress, I have to support myself on my hands. I worry that a latex mattress that’s soft enough to allow side sleeping might be too soft to transfer around. I have to sit up with my legs out in front, and push off with my knuckles to scoot my butt around. If my hands sink in too deeply, I won’t be about to move around. That’s a deal-breaker.

So I’m hoping to find a compromise between my two requirements. It would be nice if I could go somewhere locally and try out a quality latex mattress, but I haven’t found anywhere around here that I can do that.

Most recently, I’ve been looking at Sleep EZ and Custom Sleep Design as likely suppliers. It would be nice if CSD posted prices on their website, but I’ll try to call them both tomorrow and see what they say.

I live near Raleigh, NC, and weigh about 165 lbs. Any advice would be appreciated.

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Hi Haas,

I think you are very wise to go slowly and take all the steps you can to make sure you end up with the most suitable choice for all your needs and preferences.

The first place I would start (in case you haven’t already read it) is post #1 here which has the information, steps, and guidelines that will help you make the best possible choices.

Second … regardless of whether you end up making an online or local purchase … I would strongly urge you to do some local testing to get a good sense of the types and designs of mattresses that are most suitable for you and your specific criteria. Nothing can replace familiarity with different designs and good local testing in terms of increasing the odds of making the best possible choice.

Some of the better options or possibilities I’m aware of in the Raleigh area are listed in post #6 here and there are many options where it is possible to test different styles of latex mattresses in the area which would be very helpful regardless of where you end up purchasing.

A mattress will be one of the most important purchases you make in the next decade and can have a bigger effect on your overall wellbeing than almost anything else so I would again encourage you again to take your time and of course feel free to ask any questions you may have along the way on the forum.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Phoenix

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Thanks for the reply, Phoenix. I’m going to check out some of those places tomorrow.