Story Progress?

So I finally got my short story close to a conclusion.  It grew and changed so much that I have a ton of work to do now at the beginning.  The way I write and edit as I go (although I kept that at a minimum this time) is by utilizing the Track Changes feature in Word, which means your word count is off, because it keeps track of text that you've deleted until you've "accepted" the change (deletion).  I like to do this in case I decide I've cut too much out, I still have the text available should I want to re-insert it.  But it is hard to keep track of the wordage that way.  So I knew I had a lot of words.  Way too many.  But I wasn't sure exactly how many.  Try 8500.  I'm sure if I go back and take out the false leads that didn't develop story-wise, I can get it down to a short story length without letting it bloat to a novella stage.  But then I heard this little whisper in my mind.  "This could be a novel.  You have another 1500 words already that you wrote as a prequel to this story as an LH challenge.  You're already at 10k."  "Shut up," I answered.  "No, really," Nefarious Mind whispered, "you can do it."  "I know I can do it.  Not sure I *want* to do it."  "Do it.  It'll be great.  You love these characters and the situation.  It's grown too big to be a short story."

Oh man, am I in trouble.