What's YOUR sleep number?

It's the first week of classes on campus. Everyone is pretty much moved in at this point, but there were some late arrivals earlier this week.

I was walking past the dormitories closest to my office when I saw a mattress company delivering, well, a mattress, to one of the dorms. It made me wonder if it was a special order for a student, or simply housing replacing a mattress demolished from parties the weekend prior.

Yes, our students order their own mattresses fairly regularly. In fact, there are so many Tempurpedic mattresses on campus that, when everyone was moving out in May, they had a few huge mobile storage units taking up a number of our staff parking spaces so students could store their super special mattress over the summer. FYI, a twin long basic Tempurpedic is about $800. That's in addition to whatever mattress these students have at home and, of course, the free one we provide. Sure, it's not great, but these are also 18 year old college students. I wasn't aware they would already be attuned to things like sleep numbers.

One of my college roommates was diagnosed with congenital scoliosis as a young child. Her spine was in the shape of a question mark. She endured multiple surgeries as a little girl and into her teenage years. She had a metal rod fused into her spine to help correct her limp. Her progress was extraordinary, though she continues to walk with a slight limp and one leg will always be noticeably weaker than the other.

So, Erin, with her severe back problem, survived four years of college without a special mattress. Every year, she brought a cardboard panel, likely cut at Home Depot, for under her university provided mattress and an egg crate to place between the mattress and her mattress pad. It was all she needed.

And her parents were not short on cash.

As a side note she went to Yale Med and is completing her reisidency at Mass General in Boston, where she spends hours on her feet.

Just sayin...