Westlyn ad: The #1 Nurse-Recommended gel cushion to prevent pressure sores without constant repositioning or missed sleep.

We spent $3,400 on a power lift chair for Mom's MS. 6 weeks later her nurse found a stage 2 pressure sore on her tailbone. I was so proud of that chair the day two delivery men carried it into our den. Mom has had MS for 14 years. She moved in with my husband and me after her second fall, and she sits 9 or 10 hours a day, so I wasn't about to let anybody talk me into the cheap one. We went to 4 furniture stores over two Saturdays. I sat in every lift chair they had, with a tape measure and the checklist her occupational therapist wrote out for us. The one we bought had a motor that stood her up at the push of a button, heat in the back, and a thick memory foam seat with "pressure relief" stitched on the label. Mom rode it all the way up the first night and said, "Well, I've got my own elevator now." 6 weeks later her home health nurse rolled her onto her side during a bath and went quiet. It was stage 2, she said, with the skin open over her tailbone. If it reached stage 3 we could be looking at months, and with MS it might not close at all. I called the store. The manager said it was their top model, with a 5-year warranty on the foam. I asked her nurse what I was doing wrong. Nothing, she said. Barrier cream, dressings, a skin check every night and getting her up every couple of hours was more than most families do. Her neurologist said people with MS are prone to pressure sores, which I knew, and which didn't explain a brand new chair. Then I noticed something nobody had asked about. For about a month Mom had been falling asleep at the kitchen table, sitting straight up in a wooden chair on a bed pillow she carried in from her room, with her lift chair sitting empty in the den behind her. I thought she liked the company in the kitchen. She told me the hard chair kept her posture good. I sat across from her that night while she slept like that, chin down and her tea gone cold, and I couldn't name one thing I'd missed. So after she went to bed I started reading. Not about how to treat a pressure sore, but about why they start. When an older person sits, most of their weight goes down into the tailbone and the two sit bones. That's a spot about the size of a credit card, and by 81 there's almost no padding left on it. If the seat underneath doesn't spread that weight out, it squeezes the little blood vessels there shut. The blood stops getting through, and so does the oxygen, and the cells start dying from the inside out, weeks before anything shows on the skin. And MS had taken some of the feeling out of Mom's legs and backside. She couldn't feel it building, so she never shifted. She sat exactly the way the chair set her down. It wasn't a chair problem. It was a pressure problem. We had paid for a motor that could lift her out of that chair, and nobody had asked what the seat was doing to her for the 9 hours she was in it. That week I found a write-up from a wound care nurse with a pressure map I still think about. A person sitting on foam lit up red right under the tailbone. Then the same person on a honeycomb gel cushion, with the red gone and the weight spread out in green across the whole seat. That's the kind of surface hospitals use for their highest-risk patients. It's a grid of medical-grade gel columns. When you sit, they don't pack down. They buckle sideways and pass the weight to the columns around them, so it spreads out instead of landing on one bone. The one she recommended has an oval hole that goes right through the cushion under the tailbone, so the exact spot that was breaking down on Mom now sits over open air. I ordered 2, one for the lift chair and one for the kitchen chair, since apparently that was hers now too. I want to be honest about the timeline, because miracle stories online don't help anybody. By the end of the first week the sore had stopped getting bigger. Her nurse said that was the sign she watched for. By week 4 it was shallower and pink around the edges. By week 8 it had closed. I won't tell you the cushion healed my mother. Her nurse did, with the dressings and the turning, which we still do. What the cushion did was stop the chair from pressing on it every afternoon while she worked. About 3 weeks in, I came home from the grocery store at 4 and Mom was in the lift chair with a jigsaw puzzle on a card table, arguing with the man on the shopping channel. "I've been sitting here since lunch," she said, "and I'm not getting up till he admits that bracelet isn't real gold." The bed pillow went back on her bed that night. If you bought the good chair and your parent is still getting sores, or has quietly stopped sitting in it, look at the seat. The motor and the heat are about getting in and out. What she sits on all day is 4 inches of foam, and foam packs down in the same spot until it's doing nothing, while it looks exactly the same from the outside. Your mom should be able to sit in her own chair without it hurting her. And you should be able to run to the grocery store without wondering what the nurse is going to find. The write-up from that wound care nurse, and the pressure map, are at the link below. 👉 westlyn.co/pages/pressure-sores