I know I should go to bed, but...

You know, from the time we're very little, we're taught by pain not to do things. We learn very quickly that if something hurts we shouldn't do that right? You reach for the pretty fire and your mom or dad smacks your hand. You don't do it again - not if you're smart. If you're not smart you do it again anyway and that pretty fire burns you and then you won't do it again for sure! You get stung by a bee once and you know for sure you don't want that to happen again and you do your best to avoid it. It's the same with anything else that hurts bad enough. You don't want a repeat performance. Well, at 57, that's pretty well ingrained in me now. Only now it's working against me because it's past my bedtime, but I don't want to go to bed because I know what's waiting for me there: pain, and lots of it. I'm not interested. Don't want to deal with it.

Yeah, I'm tired. I know I need to go to sleep. but I also know that within an hour of going to sleep, I'm going to wake up in severe pain. If I then get up and deal with the pain and get it taken care of and go back to bed, I'll then wake up again a little later again in severe pain. This will just continue in a vicious circle until I finally give up and just stay up. OR sometimes, if I'm lucky and time it right, I can manage to stay up all night and avoid the worst of the pain and then go to bed and sleep when everyone else is getting up. Because by then, I should be so totally exhausted that the pain won't wake me up until I've had a good 4 hours of sleep or so at least. But that doesn't usually work until I've had less then 2 hours sleep for a couple of nights in a row beforehand.

So, tonight, I'm rebelling. I'm not going to bed. Not until I don't have any other choice.