Our Bed Sits Up

A couple of months ago, we received a HUGE BLESSING from Michael's Aunt Teresa and Uncle Terry.

An adjustable bed.

An adjustable bed has many benefits for us since Michael can't sit up on his own. It gives him more independence, and ideally, lets us sit up in bed to eat breakfast in bed, or read, or watch TV, or do other things. :)

We had planned on getting an adjustable bed "one day," but since they cost in the neighborhood of $5,000 it wasn't really ever going to happen. Originally, we were going to use every dollar we got from our wedding and start saving toward getting the bed. But then, you know how that goes, life got in the way of that saving idea.

For our first year of marriage, we slept in my queen sized bed. It was nothing fancy, but it did the job. We did get kind of crowded, though, because between us we use something like 7 or 8 pillows, depending on the night!

Then, out of the blue, Michael gets a phone call from his Aunt Teresa. One of Uncle Terry's family members passed away and they inherited some money and wanted to use some of it to buy us this bed.

Michael called me at work, very excited. Here's where my wonderful ability to take a perfectly happy thing that is a "blessing" and turn it into something horrible comes in. I tried to act excited when I was on the phone with him. But when we got off the phone, I cried.

It wasn't that I didn't want the bed. I did! Especially since I knew we could get a king sized bed and I would have room to build my pillow fort that I like to build! :)

I didn't want to need an adjustable bed. This happens to me a lot. (If I'm feeling open and post about my feelings a lot, you'll definitely see this recurring theme!) This is one of the "issues" I'm still trying to work through. I don't want anything in our house that's special, or modified, or handicapped-looking. It messes with my denial plan! I didn't want to have an adjustable bed because I didn't want to feel like we had to have a hospital bed. I don't want our bedroom looking all hospital-y, ya know? Not sexy!!

But, I couldn't deny that this was a huge gift that we would never have gotten for ourselves, not for a really long time anyway. Michael did the research and found us this AMAZING bed. It's a king size, but it doesn't have two separate mattresses. I was totally anti-two twin size mattresses. We are not 78 years old, people! We are newlyweds and it's important to me that we sleep in the SAME bed, you get me? I did not want to be all falling in the crack, because you know it would be me who fell in the crack, if there were a crack! Our new bed is a sleep number bed and it's incredibly comfortable. And we got all new, beautiful linens and it's so wonderful I have to fight myself every morning to get out of it. It's a "wall hugger" model, which means we were able to put it inside a regular bed frame. So, it's absolutely beautiful, and it doesn't look hospital-y at all!!

I am so thankful we have it. It's been life-changing.

I'm still coming around to the idea of seeing it sit up, though. A couple of times M has sat it up and we've eaten breakfast together in bed. But, that's still hard. I still cry through that. Because it makes me feel like he's sick or something. And he's NOT SICK! So, we don't do that that often. We've also sat up and read, that's a little better.

The ironic thing is... today, I'm home sick from work. I was laying in the bed sneezing and reading and cuddling with Brokaw, and I realized... oh!! I can sit this bed up! And, instantly I felt like a schmuck. How dare my paralyzed husband sit the bed up, because noooo, that will make me sad. But here I am, with a head cold or a sinus infection, and I'm sitting up in the bed, sick. Wow.