Retired From the Mill With a Sore Neck: My Pillow Fix

I spent thirty years on rotating shifts at the paper mill in Green Bay, and my body never learned the schedule. Days, then afternoons, then midnights, around and around. I figured sleep would come back on its own once I retired. It did not. For a full year after my last shift I woke three or four times a night, and most mornings I got up with a neck that felt set in concrete.

My family doctor checked me over during that year and found nothing that needed treatment. I kept waking up.

So in October of last year I sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and wrote down five things that were either waking me or wearing me down. In this order: noise, light, a sore neck, overheating, and dark mornings. Five items and nothing else. Then I bought one product for each of them, with my own money, in a single order from Amazon.

The one for the sore neck was the Coop Home Goods Original Adjustable Pillow, queen size. I am a side sleeper, which matters with this pillow more than it would for a back sleeper, and I want to be straight with you about the part where I made things worse before I made them better.

Here is what nobody told me about an adjustable pillow. The one that arrives in the box is not your pillow yet. It is a starting point, and your first week is a conversation between you and a bag of fill.

The second evening I went too far. I spent that night on a pillow that was worse than the one that came out of the box, and I have only myself to blame.

What arrived was a queen pillow listed at eight inches thick and three and a half pounds. The cover is their Lulltra fabric, a polyester and viscose blend, and the fill is cross-cut memory foam mixed with microfiber, listed at 76 percent visco foam and 24 percent gel fiber. It carries CertiPUR-US and GREENGUARD Gold certifications, which I looked up because I had never bought a pillow that listed any. There is a zipper at the end. That zipper is the whole point of the thing, because it is what lets you take fill out and put it back.

I took out about a third of the fill over three evenings. The first evening I pulled out a double handful, closed it up, and lay down. Still too tall. Too tall meant my chin tipped down toward my chest and my shoulder got shoved out of line, which is the exact position I was trying to get away from. The second evening I took out more and I overshot. I spent that night on a pillow that was worse than the one that came out of the box, too low, my head tipped back, and I woke up cranky and stiff. The third evening I put a handful back, lay down on it, and stopped. That was the end of it. About a third of the fill stayed out and I have not touched it since. All of it is in one bag in the closet.

Three complaints, and they are honest ones. There is a foam smell for the first few days. It fades, but you will notice it, so give it a few days before you judge the thing. The fill is chopped foam, so it is messy when you open the zipper. Do that over the bed or over a table, not over a rug you care about. And it is heavy for a pillow. Three and a half pounds of foam does not fluff up the way fiberfill does.

My neck eased over about two weeks. Not overnight, and I am not going to tell you it fixed anything, because it did not fix anything. What it did was stop holding my head in a bad position, and after a couple of weeks my neck quit complaining about the mornings. Before the Coop Home Goods pillow I had a flat fiberfill pillow that had gone flat, the one I was sleeping on when I wrote the list, and before that a solid block of memory foam from a warehouse store. The fiberfill went in the trash. The block is in the closet and it is staying there. What that block did was hold my head at one height no matter what my shoulder wanted, and my shoulder wanted something else.

The cover washes cold on a gentle cycle and I have done it a few times now. An ordinary queen pillowcase fits it and played no part in any of this. If I were scoring it, I would give it 8.6 out of 10, and what is missing from that score is the smell and the mess, not the sleep.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to write your own list first, on paper, before you buy anything. Mine had five items on it and only one of them was a pillow problem. If a sore neck is on yours, then an adjustable pillow is the only kind that can be set to your height, because a pillow is a height, not a softness. Take the fill out in small amounts, in daylight, and give each change one night before you change it again. That is the mistake I made on the second evening, and it cost me a night of sleep and a bad attitude the next day. Keep the fill you take out in a bag instead of throwing it away, because you may want a handful of it back.

And I would tell you what my own doctor would tell you. If bad sleep goes on for months, get checked. A pillow is a pillow. It is not a doctor and it did not cure anything for me. It took one item off my list, and one item off the list is worth having at my age. Mine has been through one winter and one summer now, and I would buy it again.