They say misery loves its company but I say it should mind its fucking business.

I’m no stranger to failure. Or misery. At least, my body isn’t. While some people’s immune systems breeze through adulthood unscathed, mine woke up and chooses chaos.

• Catching RSV from a nurse post-ACDF spinal fusion? Sure, why not? Seems on-brand for me.
• Shingles in my twenties? Spicy. My body loves things meant for the elderly.
• A medical implant that can be reprogrammed by going through airport security? Now, that’s just the cosmos testing me.

What’s even funnier is that somehow, despite all of this, I keep getting back up. Like, why bother, you know? No matter how many times my body betrays me, I keep going. And if I’m being really honest? I think I kind of like watching myself pull it off.

Not in a “challenge accepted” motivational way. No, no. I’m not motivated like that.

More like a “my kink is karma” kind of way.

Because of my body’s many ‘oopsies,’ I’ve become a pseudo-expert in problem-solving under pressure. A shit-hit-the-pants MacGyver. When life throws a weird, improbable obstacle my way, my first thought is rarely ‘Oh no, what do I do?’ but instead ‘Alright, what’s the least humiliating way to handle this?’

Except my karma is my own damn body throwing everything at me just to see if I’ll crawl out of the wreckage, dazed but alive. And honestly? The audacity of it is inspiring.

Take, for example, the time I caught RSV after spinal surgery. Another person gets out of surgery, rests, and maybe enjoys some narcotics and a soft diet.

Me? I woke up in the ER with my lungs staging a rebellion. Breathing felt like trying to inhale through a bag of freshly plucked cotton. Every breath burned. My entire body was too exhausted from surgery to even argue with the virus—it just laid down, waved a tiny white flag, and let the germs move in rent-free.

I’d love to tell you I handled it gracefully, but what actually happened was me lying in a ER bed, cursing my immune system while my wife tried her best to reassure me that my lungs would, in fact, continue functioning.

That wasn’t even the first time my body pulled a stunt like this.

Did you know shingles feel a lot like someone dragging a live wire across your skin? That’s a fun little lesson I learned in my twenties when my nervous system decided to get experimental.

The pain wrapped around my upper thigh like a bad tattoo I never asked for. just constant, searing agony that screamed DON’T TOUCH ME!

But also WHY DOES IT ITCH SO BAD at the same time?

I had to actively fight the urge to scratch obsessively at my crotch because that makes it worse. Which is rich, considering crotch shingles are already the worst.

But if there’s one thing more unpredictable than my immune system, it’s my relationship with airport security.

Most people walk through TSA worried about whether they accidentally packed a water bottle. Me?

I’m worried about whether a metal detector is going to reset the settings on my lumbar shunt and send me into instant neurological mayhem.

My lumbar peritoneal shunt—an adjustable implant that helps drain spinal fluid—responds to magnets. Like. That’s how they set it and stuff. And wouldn’t you know it, the same technology TSA uses to determine if you’re a national threat uses magnets! It has the potential to turn my shunt into a roulette wheel of suffering.

Try explaining that to an agent at 5 AM.

There is no point, honestly. I’ve brought letters from Doctors telling them “no magnets” explicitly. They aren’t paid enough to have compassion to understand that.

Once you’ve had your shunt reset and the pain hit hundreds of miles away from home you learn you’re able to handle it. I still got home. Got to my neurosurgeon. Got the special magnet to reset my shunt. All while a vice clamped down so hard I couldn’t stand.

And yet, after all this, after the RSV, the shingles, and all other medical chaos that follows me, I still go places. I still get on planes, even though I know the atmospheric pressure may make my head feel like it’s imploding. I still walk through security, even though there’s a non-zero chance I’ll emerge on the other side needing emergency intervention. I still keep living despite my body’s best attempts to make me reconsider.

And I hate to admit it, but I think a part of me thrives on this nonsense.

Like, is it healthy that I get a little rush from proving to myself (and the universe) that I can survive all of the absurd obstacles my body throws at me? Probably not.

But you know what? If I had let all of this stop me, I wouldn’t have met my wife. I wouldn’t have said “I do” under the stars in the middle of the day (yes, really). I wouldn’t have built a life that is so much bigger than all the ways my body tries to sabotage me.

I wouldn’t be here.

People spend their lives dreading worst-case scenarios. I’ve lived so many of them that I’ve practically built a timeshare there. And honestly? It’s not that bad.

You learn how to keep going. You learn how to laugh. And eventually, you learn that surviving it all is its own kind of success

So yeah. Maybe my kink is watching myself get better, against all odds. Maybe failure, in its own ridiculous way, has been the best kind of path to success. Because every time my body tries to take me out, I prove it wrong. And if that’s not a success story, I don’t know what is.

And if I’ve learned anything from this mess of a body? It’s that misery loves company. But between you and me? I think I might just love proving it wrong. Instead, I’m turning it into a book so it can pay me for all the times I’ve suffered at it’s hand.

So tell me—what’s the most absurd way you have failed and learned? If you can’t laugh about it together, what’s even the point?