I was actually woken up by my alarm this morning. That's impressive because it means I wasn't woken up in the middle of the night thanks to my back. It's been interesting watching myself getting so grateful for the ability to wake up in the morning without pain. It's happened 3 times (counting today) this past month. But no matter how grateful I am for the lack of pain, the majority of mornings I wake up at 4-5am unable to sleep.

So I get up, take a Vioxx and sit in my chair waiting for it to kick in. That takes about an hour if I'm lucky and the single pill works. Sometimes I have to take a second pill to make the pain go away enough to sleep again for an hour or so. Then my alarm wakes me up and I'm off to get Sara ready for and to school.

Sometimes I can't carry the Brita filter over to the coffee maker to make my morning coffee without the weight setting off spasms. Most of the time the simple, simple act of bending over to feed the cats is more than I can handle. Then there's not knowing if I should ice my back or heat it to make the pain ease. And most of this is on the dose of painkillers I had taken a couple hours before.

What's been happening because of this is how tired I've become. Life still moves around me and I still have responsibilities to it. I have to get up at 7am most school days. I have to move and live. But my business can stand a fairly large amount of neglect and it has been. I haven't been working at all, really.

I get Sara to school, come home, spend some time online and then I nap through the middle of the day. I've already napped for 2 hours today alone and this was a day I woke up pain free.

I guess in all my bitching and complaining there's just this -- I'm so very tired. It's no longer that light exhaustion that had me worried I was getting depressed from a couple weeks ago, now it's something eating my time and my energy. I'm sitting here seeming unable to wake up fully. This sucks. I need to figure out how to beat this.

And that's 30 minutes.