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Tempurpedic off-gassing, safe? Tempurary?

Hello All,

My wife and I just bought a Tempurpedic "Deluxe" queen sized bed.  We did a fair amount of reading on the subject of mattress comfort and were influenced in no small part by the testimonial of my sister and brother-in-law who have had one for 8 years and still love it.  For full disclousre, they've only ever called it "memory foam" or "astronaut foam" and never Tempurpedic specifically, but they live in France where they have different words for just about everything, and how many of these space-age mattress companies were around in 1999 anyway?  We tried all the Tempurpedic options at a local retailer as well as some other latex foam and new-fangled "mixed media" concoctions from other brands and settled on the Tempurpedic Deluxe.

It was delivered yesterday morning while I was at work and my wife (who had the day off) complained immediately about the "fresh paint" smell.  When I got home I had to agree.  We were both tickled pink about having a new mattress (it's long overdue), but our enthusiasm for the level of comfort provided was somewhat damped at least by the malodorousness.  We also got the tempurpedic pillows, so I can only assume that the smell is increased by having your head directly on the stuff as well.  I had read some complaints about the smell when new in various reviews, but generally the owners said it went away after a few weeks at the most and didn't bother them after that.

Last night I awoke once during the night with chills, pulled some more blankets on and went back to sleep and awoke refreshed for the most part and feeling pretty good about the purchase, not remembeirng waking with chills and certainly not thinking about it.

Tonight, I laid down on the new bed for about 40 minutes in the middle of the evening and then got up and messed around the computer and watches American Idol.  After about an hour I started to feel pretty ill.  It's hard to describe exactly except that I felt a little like I was going to throw up.  I thought about possible food poisoning but hadn't eaten anything particularly scary and the sensation was too long after eating to be likely caused by food poisoning (I've heard that if food poisoning is going to make you throw up it does so very quickly - like 20 minutes to a half an hour after eating, after that it's going to come out the other end).   The feeling slowly subsided and eventually I just decided to go to bed.  At around 1 am (after about 2 and a half hours), I awoke with chills again, but this time they were worse and I just generally didn't feel well. 

In the wee hours, swaddled in darkness, the mind begins to look for bogeymen, and I started thinking about this damn new mattress.  I wasn't feeling any too much like sleeping on it after a few more minutes of contemplation so I decided to surf the web for voices of reason regarding the potential dangers of the gasses coming off a Tempurpedic mattresss.  I put a thermometer in my mouth and found that I have a tiny fever as well (100 degrees).   Is it possible I have an unrelated illness?  Of course it is, but let's not call off the witch hunt just yet.

Not surprisingly, there are websites out there with strong opinions about such things (well, anything really).

www.thegreenguide.com

If one really wants to scare oneself about these mattresses though, check out an excerpt or two from "Toxic Bedrooms" on Amazon.com , where the author claims to have tested a popular memory foam mattress in a laboratory and found 61 very nasty sounding chemicals being emitted.  Yikes.

Now I try not to be an alarmist and I know there is always data out there on every side of any issue, so I'm not scrambling to pull my wife (who seems to be sleeping nicely) off the bed and go to a hotel.  I haven't tried to call Sleepy's 24 hr hotline either (asuming they have one, right? what, they don't?  how possible?). 

So to cut to the chase, I've decided to try to air out the mattress more thoroughly tomorrow and for a few days, maybe stripping off the bedding and draping it over a chair with the windows open and a fan on it, switch to a regular pillow for a little while (and air out the toxic chem-pillow) and see what happens.  If the smell doesn't go away before the end of our return privilege impends, I guess we'll just have to return the thing and try something else.  But even if it does go away, does that really mean it's safe?

Any doctors, scientists or regular sleepers have an opinion about this stuff?

_john