Hi, I’m hoping some knowledgeable people here might be able to help with a mattress quandary I have. I thought I’d done my research but it seems maybe not, and reading lots of websites is just steering me towards the mattress I bought, which doesn’t help!
We’ve just emigrated from Scotland to Canada, bringing with us my old (7yrs) super basic cheap mattress. When we arrived we stayed at a furnished holiday cottage for a month. I have back issues (more on this in a minute) so I was a bit worried about sleeping on a cottage mattress for a month, but lo and behold it was lovely! It was a different ‘species’ of mattress than I was used to, with a squishy layer on top of a firmer surface, which worried me at first but turned out to be great. (The mattresses I’d seen in the UK had never had this foam+spring combination).
So we move into our permanent home, our belongings arrive, and I am thinking ‘ahhh, my own bed’! But my back is not so impressed, and I find the old mattress uncomfortable. It was on its last legs really - getting a bit lumpy, not offering much support - and after sleeping on a different style of mattress for 4 weeks I realised that my own old mattress was useless, and perhaps adding to my back pain. So it was time to invest in a new mattress.
A bit about me… I’m about 5’5", female, and weigh about 140lbs. I have had lower back problems for over 10 years now, linked to my sacroiliac area. Every few years it seems to flare up and I go to physio / osteopath for treatment. I’ve recently had about 4 months osteopath treatment which improved things a lot. My general symptoms tend to be a very stiff lower back, and sore hips. I’m a side sleeper, but this can thensometimes lead to hip pain when I wake up. When things are going well I can be symptom-free, or I can have mild symptoms as at the moment where my back can be stiff and my hips sore in the morning, or it can be bad and I have trouble walking, sitting or doing anything.
So I started looking into mattresses and my partner and I went to various shops. I eventually settled on a local store with a good reputation, and bought a Sealy posturepedic cashmere ‘Silver Moss’ cushion top. This is a medium/firm mattress with layers of different foams, a supportive middle section to reduce sagging, and pocket coils (I’d post a link but their website is conveniently not working properly right now!). We also got a boxspring to go with it as we didn’t have one.
I went with this mattress because it was not super soft (despite loving the feeling of lying on a marshmallow I didn’t think that would be good with my back, not providing as much support) but it was also not firm - being a side sleeper I was trying to avoid pressure points on my hips.
The first night the bed felt a bit firmer than I remembered in the shop, but I had a good nights sleep, waking up with no pain. But unfortunately it didn’t last. Every night since I have woken with some degree of stiffness in my lower back, and some degree of ache in my hips - generally the one I sleep on. I would say I’m ‘sinking in’ to the mattress more now, and it does feel like it contours to my shape, but there must be something going wrong somewhere. I’m really frustrated - I’ve never owned an expensive mattress and I’ve also only really had pain issues when waking on my old worn mattress so I was expecting a new mattress to make me never want to get out of bed.
We have 90 days to exchange the mattress (we’ve had it for almost a week) but we only get one exchange, and the shop we bought it from doesn’t have the biggest range available. Now I wish we’d bought from the biggest store I could find, but I really didn’t expect a problem.
So I’m really hoping for some advice… is the situation likely to improve over the next week or 2? If I exchange the mattress what type should I be looking for? If I exchange it again and end up with a worse mattress then I’ll be really stuck.
Oh, the mattress I slept on at the cottage is a Simmons Beauty Rest ‘Tradition’ Wool, Contour Flex, Pocket Coil Construction. I googled that and couldn’t find it, so perhaps it’s an older model. Unfortunately the shop we bought from doesn’t carry Simmons
Thanks in advance for any help