Fragments From Floyd

Traveling is a mixed bag: you encounter new people, places and experiences, but you forfeit the familiar customs and amenities of home. Perhaps the hardest sacrifice of travel for me is sleeping without my pillows. I cannot abide fiber or foam, and this has mostly to do with the sleep ergonomics of head support. My two-pillow system works for me: a contour memory foam pillow underneath with a light feather pillow on top. Coming back home to sleep in my own bed after some time out of town is a real treat. But wait: maybe all is not well in the Land of Nod.

Pillows are ecosystems, and not all creatures in the forest are friendly.

"We know that pillows are inhabited by the house dust mite which eats fungi, and one theory is that the fungi are in turn using the house dust mites' faeces as a major source of nitrogen and nutrition (along with human skin scales). There could therefore be a 'miniature ecosystem' at work inside our pillows."

It's bad enough thinking of this jungle of beasties living in your own pillow, much less those nights you spend in Ramada Inn sleeping on the sloughed skin cells and associated arthropodial poop of the past hundred guests who used that same foam pillow before you came along. Mostly, there is only mild risk of disease. However, if you have astham or have lowered immunity, the fungus, Apergillus, can be lethal:

Immuno-compromised patients such as transplantation, AIDS and steroid treatment patients are also frequently affected with life-threatening Aspergillus pneumonia and sinusitis. Fortunately, hospital pillows have plastic covers and so are unlikely to cause problems, but patients being discharged home - where pillows may be old and fungus-infected - could be at risk of infection.

Now I'm generally not squeamish about this sort of thing, bug-friendly as I am. But even so, later today I think I'll toss my feather pillow into the dryer on no heat with a couple of old tennis shoes for a bit of extra pounding. Let's just see if we can get some of that mite dust and Aspergillus to end up out the exhaust or captured in the lint filter rather than lodged in my distal bronchioles.