Won't soon forget that memory foam

Thankfully I haven't been a patient in the hospital for years. A couple of outpatient visits to a surgical center have been it. Actually most of my hospital stays have been for the express purpose of having babies, so you can figure for yourself that it has been a while since I stayed in one.

Last week, I made a few visits to my daughter who was at the hospital for the same purpose. Three generations of us in the same room.

Well, some things have changed. The nurse was excited to announce that they had redone their recovery rooms and installed new hospital beds which have memory foam mattresses. I guess that is a good thing, but whoever ordered those for the hospital “forgot” that the goal is to turn over those beds.

And still, my daughter couldn't wait to get home even though her bed at home is quite forgetful. She was convinced that the hospital mattress was suffering from total recall and could remember the patients before her better than it could remember her.

Seriously, memory foam is pressure sensitive. The greater the pressure upon it, the greater the indentation in the foam.

As you can imagine new mothers have to sit up in bed a lot—to hold and feed the baby, to eat hospital food (which is not new and different) from a roll-away table, sign birth certificates and social security applications, to visit with her in-laws, and to impress some of the many caregivers who enter her room every five minutes. These people are more apt to let her go home if she is sitting up in bed looking healthy.

All that sitting up means is that there is a pretty hefty column of pressure forming that indentation right underneath the more vertical parts of her body. Add another eight pounds for the baby and you have quite a few psi's, or maybe column inches or whatever, depressing that foam.

I'm not sure what happens when you stand on a memory foam mattress, which would bring even more pressure to bear, but when you sit on one for a while, you get a pretty big depression down under. Pretty soon, mother needs more help getting out of the mattress than grandpa needs getting out of his chair. Gives a whole new meaning to the term “doughnut cushion.”

After a while of sitting in the doughnut hole (not to be confused with when you have to pay for your own prescriptions) the bottom bottoms out, and underneath that memory foam is something a little less resilient. Something with properties similar to rock or concrete.

At the end (pun) the new mother finds that she is wishing for an old-fashioned doughnut cushion made of absent-minded blow-up vinyl.