How I stop MS from taking over the whole room

Chapter promise: This chapter shows how small physical, emotional, and mental loads pile up until the disease starts taking control away — and how I catch that early enough to stay present in my own life.

Frame: If I don’t notice the stack early, MS takes over.

Stacking is what happens when little costs pile up faster than my body can absorb them.

That’s still the cleanest way I know to describe it.

But stacking is not just about the body.

It’s not only about getting more tired.

Not only about pain getting louder.

Not only about the leg dragging more or the hand clawing harder.

Stacking is what happens when the load gets too big and MS starts taking control away from me.

That’s the real danger.

Because once the stack gets too high, it threatens more than energy. It threatens my ability to stay present, to stay calm, to stay connected, to feel like a whole person inside the day.

It starts pushing me away from myself and toward a version of me that is just symptoms, frustration, and damage control.

That’s why this chapter matters.

I’m not trying to be some productivity wizard here.

I’m trying to keep my life from turning into only MS.

I want my life to be my life.

Not MS to be my life.

The best way I can picture stacking now is carrying a stack of books across a room.

If I’m carrying five books, I can probably handle a few bumps in the floor. The room can be a little messy. Maybe there’s a loose board, a stone, a bit of uneven ground.

I can adjust.

I can compensate.

But if I’m carrying twenty books, that changes everything.

Now every bump matters.

Now every wobble matters.

Now every little shift in the ground matters.

And if the terrain gets rough enough — potholes, loose bricks, uneven footing — then one bad step turns the whole thing into a yard sale.

Books go flying.

I go down.

Everything becomes a mess.

That’s stacking.

A small load can survive a little chaos.

A huge load plus bad terrain cannot.

That’s what a day with MS can feel like. The load gets too high, the terrain gets rough, and all the little things I might have handled earlier start becoming impossible to carry cleanly.

The most common version of stacking for me starts with ordinary life.

Shoes in the wrong place.

The thing I need is in the wrong room.

The lunch I wanted is in the garage fridge instead of the kitchen fridge.

Forgot the lid.

Forgot the hat.

Forgot the right shoes.

Forgot where I put the thing I need.

None of that sounds like much when you’re healthy.

But with MS, every extra transition and every little scavenger hunt is another sip out of the same glass.

And the problem is not just the physical movement. The problem is what all those little taxes start doing to my mind, my mood, and my ability to stay steady.

That’s why I care so much about reducing surprises.

If something simple becomes a hunt, the stack has already started.

And once the stack starts, it doesn’t stay politely physical.

It clouds things.

It fogs things.

It leaks into how I think, how I feel, how I speak, how I move around the people I love.

That’s the part of stacking that matters most to me now.

Because the bigger threat is not “I’m tired.”

The bigger threat is that the disease starts taking over the room.

A Thursday is a good example of how this works.

The day did not fall apart all at once.

It started going bad before the visible day had even really begun.

One of my daughters was having a hard emotional morning, and that hit me first.

Hard.

I don’t just notice those moments. My brain immediately starts firing, trying to figure out what to say, how to steady the situation, how to calm the spark before it becomes a fire.

That part of me is old.

I grew up around emotional chaos. My mother was volatile in a lot of ways — substance abuse, emotional explosions, the kind of home where a spark could become a fire fast.

My response as a kid was to learn how to put water on sparks before they turned into flames.

I became the person trying to diffuse the room, say the right thing, steady the mood, keep everything from going sideways.

That wiring stayed with me.

It made me good at defusing situations later in life. But it also means family distress costs me more than it might look like from the outside.

My nervous system doesn’t treat it like a small inconvenience.

It treats it like something urgent that has to be managed.

So the stack started there.

And then the rest of the day still had to happen.

School drop-off.

Calls.

Appointment stuff.

Prescription stuff.

The hidden physical work of getting my body ready — stretching, compression gear, AFO, support shirt, all the fine-motor effort before I had even gotten to the “real” tasks.

By the time I was headed to therapy, I was already paying.

The body told me before the schedule did.

The first sign was my right hand.

That’s usually where things show themselves first. My ring finger starts curling in hard. The claw starts forming.

Then the legs start feeling heavier.

Then the brain gets that buzzy, thinned-out feeling around the edges.

Then comes the most dangerous part:

false urgency.

The feeling that I need to rush, move faster, bring it up a notch, get ahead before the body catches up.

That’s the stack lying to me.

Because the moment I feel the urge to hurry, the system is already slipping.

And emotionally, the word for that morning was trapped.

That’s the feeling.

Trapped.

Because I already knew I was paying, and I already knew the day still had things in it that had to happen.

Therapy was not optional.

School pickup was not optional.

Getting home safely was not optional.

There was no room for anything to go badly.

The whole thing suddenly felt like it had to be precise, like a surgeon, and it was only around 9 a.m.

That’s what people miss about stacking.

It’s not just that a lot is happening.

It’s that there is no margin left while it’s happening.

Therapy made that undeniable almost right away.

Even before the main work started, I could feel it. I sat down and started stretching my hamstrings, and just getting my leg into position already felt slightly lagged, slightly off.

Then we moved into the warm-up.

The upper-body stuff was manageable.

But the seated march — where we sit and lift our knees — told the truth immediately.

My right leg was glued to the floor.

Glued.

So glued that I barely even bothered trying to lift it. I was already conserving whatever energy I had left and mostly working the left side.

Then came sit-to-stands, one of the clearest measures of how my body is functioning.

Normally I’m trying to hit twenty in two minutes.

That day I was doing maybe ten — five in the first minute, five in the second — and even that felt like work I didn’t really have.

That was the moment I knew:

this session was going to be a struggle.

Then came weight shifting. More sit-to-stands. More reps that should have been manageable but weren’t.

Ten became eight.

Eight became six.

Every little section was shrinking in real time.

I wasn’t doing therapy anymore.

I was negotiating with depletion.

Then the track.

We usually do 200 meters. That day I made it through about half before I had to tap out.

And then the steps.

That was the real oh shit moment.

Because the steps are where the stack stopped being theoretical.

I tried to start the step-up pattern — up and down, up and down — and my right leg just would not do it.

It was over.

I think I made it through two or three tries before I knew I was done.

Not “I should push harder.”

Done.

And that’s when the goal changed completely.

The goal was no longer to finish therapy.

The goal was to get home safely.

That’s what stacking does. It changes the whole day’s meaning in real time.

It takes away choice.

It takes away range.

It takes away the version of me that was trying to live a normal day.

And it replaces that with a version that is just trying to survive the next hour safely.

That’s why I care so much about catching it early.

Because once the stack gets too big, MS starts taking control away.

I had to get one of the therapists to bring me my cane and help me get back to my seat.

And once I sat down, I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel embarrassment. I didn’t feel frustration with myself.

I felt sad.

And I felt afraid.

Not of the future.

Not of my whole life.

Just of getting home.

That was the emotional truth of it.

I was sitting there meditating, trying to quiet my brain, trying to let my body settle just enough to drive, and the only real thought underneath all of it was:

can I get home?

And even once I did get home, the stack wasn’t finished charging interest.

I shuffled inside wrecked. Took off my workout shoes. Tried to focus on the basics.

Hang up the jacket.

Put the glasses somewhere safe.

Get to the washroom.

Start building the recovery setup: water, chair, iPad, glasses, sit down, breathe, recover.

Then I realized I didn’t have my glasses.

And that tiny problem exploded.

I went back to where I hang up my coat at the front of the house, and the glasses were right there in my field of view — but my brain couldn’t even register them.

I checked my jacket pocket.

Nothing.

And in what felt like half a second, the panic chain fired off:

They’re at therapy.

How am I going to call them?

Are they even free to answer?

How am I supposed to drive back there?

These glasses are expensive.

I cannot afford to replace them.

I do not have the body function to go back out.

That’s stacking too.

Not just the missed item.

The way the brain turns one small hitch into a full-body crisis because there is no margin left.

I shuffled back out to the car, almost fell twice, checked the seats, the floor, everywhere.

Nothing.

Came back inside, and just as I was about to spiral into the next problem, my mother-in-law held them up and said:

“Are you looking for these?”

They had been there the whole time.

That’s what stacking does.

It takes away room.

It takes away softness.

It takes away perspective.

And if I don’t catch it early, it starts taking away me.

That’s why I think of stacking as a threat to my identity, not just my body.

Because when the stack gets too big for me to carry, I stop feeling like I’m steering my own life.

I become a big ball of symptoms, chaos, pain, anger, guilt, and damage control.

My dignity starts slipping.

My self-worth starts slipping.

My relationships start feeling the pressure of it.

It becomes harder to stay present, harder to stay kind, harder to stay engaged.

That’s the real theft.

The same thing happens with invisible load.

Thinking is load.

Dictating is load.

Remembering is load.

Explaining is load.

Organizing is load.

Making decisions is load.

Trying to pull stories out of your own life and turn them into words is load.

Just because I’m sitting still doesn’t mean I’m not spending.

That’s a lesson I keep having to relearn, because the work that looks least physical can still take a huge bite out of me.

Book work is one of those loads.

If I spend an hour and a half dictating, remembering, organizing, and explaining, then go to therapy and act surprised that my legs feel like concrete, I’ve lied to myself about the cost.

That’s stacking too.

And once again, the danger is bigger than tiredness.

The danger is that invisible load makes me less able to stay present in my life. Less able to hold the room. Less able to be myself.

That’s why I use the Unstack Four.

The Unstack Four

This is the fastest way I know how to bring the load back down before it starts swallowing the whole day.

Water
Hydration first. Not because it’s glamorous. Because it changes how my system feels.

Sit
Stop moving. Good chair. Stable position. Take the body out of the fight.

Quiet the brain
Stop feeding the spiral. Less noise. Less talking. Less input.

Anchor to what’s here
Breath. Chair. Room. Video. Four things around me. Something immediate and real.

That’s not a cure.

It’s not magic.

It’s just how I stop the stack from turning me into a worse version of myself for the rest of the day.

Because if I catch the stack early, I protect a lot.

I protect my mood.

I protect my patience.

I protect my relationships.

I protect my dignity.

I protect my chance to stay present in my own life.

That’s what catching it early really means.

Not “I win.”

Not “I beat MS.”

Just:

the disease doesn’t get to take over the whole room.

The most common stack ingredients are predictable by now:

emotional stress, especially anger

dehydration

poor sleep

standing too long

too many transitions

bad weather and pressure swings

long drives

awkward lifts

surprise admin

trying to “just squeeze one more thing in”

And once the stack starts rising, I can feel it.

The first things I lose are clarity, movement quality, and patience.

My brain starts buffering.

My right hand starts clawing.

My leg drags more.

My stride shortens.

My patience thins out.

The more it slips, the more I try to hurry.

And the more I hurry, the worse my body performs.

That’s the cascade.

The first rule of stacking is simple:

Catch it early.

Because if I don’t notice the stack early, MS takes over.

And I do not want that making my decisions.

That’s why the chapter matters.

Not because stacking is an interesting symptom pattern.

Because noticing it early is one of the ways I keep my life from becoming only about the disease.

I want my life to be my life.

MS is not my life.

Tool Summary

When to use: When the day starts wobbling from unplanned stuff, hidden load, or one too many little costs.

Goal: Catch the stack before it swallows the whole day.

Core idea: Stacking threatens more than energy. It threatens presence, dignity, and control.

What to take from it: If I don’t notice the stack early, MS takes over.