Impulse Buys While Exhausted

Our primary impulse buy yesterday...

As many of you already know, Sheila and I are worn out, exhausted and quite often we find ourselves walking around in a bit of a daze. I think we're kind of numb. 

We've spent far too much time at hospitals since last summer and we are simply worn down and exhausted. No offense to our doctors and our respective medical teams, but we are also sick of doctors and hospitals at this point. 

In addition to all these medical appointment and our illnesses, we are also not sleeping too well which is adding to our exhaustion. My extensive spinal injuries, bone pain and joint pain are keeping me up at night not to mention that the past seven months have been a bit stressful and that is contributing to sleep issues as well. Sheila is into a whole slew of new side effects due to her new cancer treatment which includes pain, hot flashes and drenching night-sweats while attempting to get some much needed rest. Difficulty sleeping has been compounding our exhaustion from far too much time spent at hospitals over the past seven months. 


Yesterday, after dental appointments and then a late lunch at Marco's Pizza with Liza and the kids (a delicious lunch, by the way), Sheila and I decided to stop at a local furniture store on our way home to check out mattresses in the hope of finding one which will provide a way to sleep better and get some much needed rest. 

Truthfully, our plan was to shop around as our time and energy would allow over the next few months and then decide on the best option and hopefully catch a good sale at some point. We both like to sit on big purchases and weigh all our options carefully... and then wait on a sale... usually, anyway.

Our plans changed shortly after lying on the first comfortable bed yesterday. We were pretty sure that we would do some shopping around over the coming weeks or months and then decide whether this $3500 mattress and base was worth the cost. This expensive mattress was very comfortable though!


We visited that first furniture store and then suddenly decided to stop at another furniture store which we would be passing on our way home. While leaving that second store, we noticed a furniture store next door to this second store we visited and decided, "what the heck, we should check that out too while we are here and they are open."

Up until we had arrived at this store, we had previously been lying on each mattress and simply testing how it feels to us. If I got up and my spine was screaming, it was not a good choice. If Sheila was feeling pain from her surgery, it was not a good choice. 


A belly full of NY-style pizza, garlic knots and meatballs = happy boy.
It was actually quite easy to narrow down our choices since most of the mattresses caused an excruciating "ringing" pain throughout my spine whenever I stood up stopping me dead in my tracks for about ten seconds. For me and my spinal injuries, the worst mattresses of the bunch were the memory foam mattresses but we found that the top-of-the-line coil mattresses (which still have a couple of memory foam features in them... particularly in the plush pillowtops) were quite comfortable and  were not causing any pain for me. Because of this, we had been focusing on the best mattresses which cost thousands of dollars.

Not that we were interested in memory foam mattresses anyway but I should also add that we learned that the memory foam mattresses (the ones that are ALL memory foam) only last approximately 10 years! If you sweat in bed, they will break down even more quickly! We didn't find the memory foam mattresses comfortable anyway but these two little known facts excluded them from our available options.

When we arrived at this third store we visited, our salesperson had us lie on a computer-guided evaluation bed to map out our pressure points and choose a few mattresses options which would be best suited to us specifically. The first recommended mattress we tried, we liked. Actually, we like it a lot. It was comparable to the only mattress we found appropriate at that first furniture store an hour earlier but, on the positive side, it was about half the price including the adjustable power base. That was great news!  

We then tried a few other mattresses that the computer had chosen for us but none of them were suitable... mostly due to the pain they caused us. We kept coming back to that first mattress that the computer-guided evaluation chose for us.


While the manager, our salesperson and I talked about frames and power base options for this mattress, Sheila continued to lay on this mattress so it was clear that she found it very comfortable. We chose a nice tilting/elevating power base for this plush comfortable mattress making it even more comfortable and suitable for two patients chronically convalescing at home.

After trying a few different remote power bases, we knew we wanted this particular bed and a power tilting base.

When we first arrived at this third store of the day, we had passed a nice sectional couch that was on the small side and on sale so we headed back toward the couches. We've been in the market for a new sectional couch for about two years now but finding one that will fit in our small living room has been a nagging, frustrating problem. More good news... here we had a comfortable sectional couch in the same store that had a very comfortable mattress... and everything was on sale!  


I think that a serious lack of sleep and, generally speaking, being quite uncomfortable due to our illnesses caused some impulsive behavior because we walked out of that store with a firm quote for a comfortable mattress with an adjustable power base and a comfortable sectional couch! We really had only planned to go to the dentist and then have some lunch with Liza and the kids! 

I finalized plans for delivery this morning. I arranged for a pickup of our old furniture too. Although this is the type of impulse buy which should always be avoided at all cost, we are both looking forward to this new furniture.

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