Whilst the bed seems to be a minor miracle of engineering, it’s not particularly comfortable – the mattress claims to be made of that “developed by NASA” memory foam stuff but it actually feels quite hard. Sure, it is made of foam but it’s certainly a far cry from the other examples of memory foam I’ve slept on.

This in itself wasn’t a big problem, though, because when I was sleeping in a standard bed whenever I got uncomfortable (sore bum, heels etc.) I could, with some effort, roll onto my side. Unfortunately, because I haven’t actually done this for nearly three months it proved somewhat difficult. Add to that the fact that the side rails attached to the bed were freezing to the touch at 2 o’clock in the morning!

Anyway, I managed to roll onto my right-side and get back to sleep. Of course I then woke up a couple of hours later with a sore shoulder and hip and, even worse, I’d completely forgotten about my foot ulcer which was also giving me some gip. By the morning I was (and still am) very tired and a little bit sore.

This isn’t to say that the bed is a disaster – far from it. It’s very easy to use (to get from lying down to sitting on the side of the bed only requires me to hold down a single button) and is very neat and remarkably quiet in its operation. N has fitted the memory foam mattress topper that my mum bought with the bed she loaned me after I came out of hospital for me to try tonight. If that fails, I’ve got a goose feather mattress topper in the cupboard to try. And then we can try both together.

And about those hand rails: when the salesman was giving me and my occupational therapist his sales pitch, he told us that the rails were 300GBP … each! So, obviously, we didn’t order any. But, as I said early, the bed was delivered with to of them and there was nothing on the receipt or delivery note about them. Maybe they were added as compensation for the bed being so late or maybe it was simply a mistake. Either way, I’m keeping my mouth shut!