This hack comes from a very specific need: Magnolia in Maryland, who is caring for her husband, talked about how painful it can be for any kind of pressure to be on his feet and legs. This includes the weight of sheets and blankets. Yet he needs to be kept warm and spends almost all of his time in bed.
To address this need, Magnolia took an old drying rack for hanging wet clothes that she found in the garage and repurposed it. She positioned it at the bottom of the bed, and slid one of its arms under the covers. This lifted them just enough so that they hovered closely over him. About the drying rack, she says, “It’s very old, it was my mother-in-law’s,” she says. “I saw it just sitting in the garage and said, ‘I know a good use for that.’ I’m a scrounger!”
After she rigged it up, she said, “He’s been sleeping with that thing over him, so when I put him to bed, I make sure his feet are under that so that the blankets don’t touch him and he’s slept very happily now for many months with that. It’s an old thing. You can see the base of it under the bed to the left. It’s a metal clothes pole.”
What’s great about this is that it does the job on a budget. ” They do have what they call bed racks for that purpose. But they’re very expensive. I was shocked. You could buy something, a frame that you can put a blanket over so people who I guess Parkinson’s people have a lot of trouble with this as well, blankets hurting their skin but these frames cost about $300. I just was apoplectic about that.” So she, said, she was determined to get creative. “I went out in the garage, and I stood there with my hands on my hips and I said, “What can we use to represent that?” I looked at the clothes pole, I said, “Yep, that’ll do,” and it’s been working great.”
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