September 8, 2025
I took a great trip to Seattle this week.
I walked Pike Place Market. Ate incredible food. Stood outside the spheres. Spent time in the pop culture museum. On the surface, it was exactly the kind of trip I love: movement, noise, life.
Underneath, things were unraveling.
The trip came after five weeks of constant aching in my back and trap. Enough pain that I had to limit training, which is always my first real warning sign. By the end of the trip, I could barely walk through the airport. Every step brought sharp, unignorable pain. Not soreness. Not fatigue.
The next day I felt noticeably better, though far from well. My trap finally released. It felt like a system crash followed by a reboot, as if my nervous system stopped prioritizing that one problem because something more urgent moved to the top of the list. New failures demanding attention.
That’s when it really hit me.
I’ve been using strength and grit to bulldoze through things my body no longer wants to do. And I’ve been worse than even I was willing to admit.
Lately, the shifts in my MS are hard to ignore. What started as neck pain spread into my trap, shoulder, and back. Some of that improved, but now activity, especially walking or travel, pushes me past a limit I don’t recover from quickly anymore.
This isn’t just fatigue. It’s pain, stiffness, and slips in coordination. A flare that doesn’t reset with sleep. Recovery used to take hours. Now it takes days. Sometimes longer. Sometimes it never quite finishes.
I still train BJJ. I still feel strong. But I know I’m muscling through things. Even short walks carry consequences now. I’ve started seriously considering using my chair part-time. Not for attention. Not for optics. Just to preserve what’s left of my daily function.
I hate MRIs. I’ve avoided them for years. But I’m starting to accept they may still offer useful information. I’ve also noticed subtle changes in my vision. MS or not, something is shifting.
It feels like I’m hovering around an EDSS of 6.5 or higher, even if I can still push through and appear more functional than I am. The line between “still good” and “declining” feels thinner every day.
That realization brings clarity.
It might mean accelerating travel plans. Planning for the next stage while still training, staying strong, and holding onto independence as long as I can. Not from fear. From realism.
The system crashed. It rebooted.
But I won’t pretend it changed nothing.