What time is it? 3:07 AM
 

Got my quarterly cortisone injection today (well, technically yesterday). That shot amps me up for about 24 hours, it's hard to slow down. I've been bingeing TV shows, watching to the trash pandas trying to break into the bird feeders out on the deck, and obviously posting here. If this one goes true to experience I'll eventually sleep for a few hours and then feel back to normal, only with somewhat less arthritis pain.
It's funny how people think of pain. They say relax and take it easy and maybe it will go away. I can say absolutely that if I lay around on my ass the pain goes away - it's moving that hurts. But I don't want to lay around on my ass. The problem with most pain killer pills is they make you groggy and take away your ambition, so you lay around and do nothing. Hell, I don't need to take drugs to lay around and do nothing, I can do that on my own. I want to be active.
So I get a quarterly cortisone shot and spend three months make decisions every hour over what is more important to me - not hurting or being productive. It's a delicate balance. I'm not happy when I'm not being productive so I work through the pain a lot. But I'm not very pleasant to be around when I've spent a couple of hours in pain, and that doesn't help the relationships. Just more life problems I didn't even think about when I was younger.
There are four of them out there now. They never give up.
Age is more than a number. It'a a pain in the ass.

I hear ya!

I get between 6-8 trigger point injections every 10 weeks or so and epidurals every once in a while.

I always plan on taking something to help me sleep otherwise I'm climbing the walls all night.

I don't do pain killers other than Tylenol and Celebrex for the arthritis.

Not fun being up for a few days.

What? There is a 3:07 AM??? Yuck. Sorry for your issues.

Many people have wondered what life would be like if we did not need sleep. Imagine just taking a magic pill that gave your brain all the needed chemical changes that sleep provides and you never felt sleepy, and would not go crazy from lack of sleep.

Sometimes I am u at 3:00 with no excuse. I knew a woman who slept no more than three hours per day. She actually looked considerably younger than she was.

307 Oldsmobile motor and also a Chevy motor. Neither were performance options.

Back in the day, I set an alarm to wake me up every morning at 2 am. I'd get out of bed, sit at the computer, and scan the news from Asia.

Nowadays I frequently wake up at 2 am or thereabouts. Surf the phone for an hour, eventually fall back asleep. Insomnia, stress, or just a bad habit that I need to break, maybe all of these.

Related topic, in pre-industrial times the normal sleeping pattern was "biphasic". People would go to sleep quite early by our standards, wake up after a couple hours, do whatever for an hour or two, and then go back to sleep. Sleep was divided into "first sleep" and "second sleep". This is thought to be related to primate sleep patterns. In the early 1800s two-sleep was abandoned, due to artificial lighting and clocks.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

Have you tried getting the shot in another place? :)

I feel you. Chronic pain affects all aspects of life and is, by itself, a serious demotivator.

ouch!!